Our relationship with money
And why culture really isn't our friend, financially speaking
Starting off the day with one of my all time favorites:
A man pushed his car. He stopped when he reached a hotel at which point he knew he was bankrupt. What happened?
Answer, at the end. If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here so you can be the one annoying your friends with lateral thinking newsletters.
Must be funny in a rich man’s world
Our relationship with money is complex. Based on your education, it’s at the root of who you are.
Also, if you don’t know the reference in the headline, we can’t be friends.
If at all, Eastern Europeans tend to get financially educated pretty late in life - if we’re being honest, the generation born in the 90s is the first one in a while to grow up in a capitalistic society, so there’s not a lot of recent history to learn from.
Westerners have a pretty good relationship with debt, on average. They tend to understand assets, inflation and diversifying risk. There’s also a lot of pressure to be financially independent as soon as possible.
I came across one of the most honest talks about money recently in a podcast. Some of you might have seen/listened to it, but here’s the transcript.
One key takeaway is that most of us have a very toxic relationship with money. We don’t really know what we want so we end up replicating what we see around us.
Based on our entourage, we end up replicating the behavior/relationship with money we see is most common.
So here’s a challenge for you - what does being wealthy look like? Not filthy rich, not winning the lottery. What does a wealthy, happy, realistic life look like to you?
Ask that of most people and they’ll either have a popular opinion or go into extremes - somehow earn millions of dollars overnight, buy some real estates and that’s that. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
So instead of asking yourself what you’d do with millions of dollars that you inherit overnight, ask yourself what a wealthy life would look like?
Is it spending $200 on groceries without batting an eye?
Is it going to a fancy every week?
Depending on when you land on, you now have something way more realistic to work towards and you’ll most likely be able to make micro-decisions to get you there.
If you’re interested in the topic, I really recommend following Ramit Sethi - he has a lot of eye-opening views on the topic.
Answer: the man was playing Monopoly.