big banks

Is cash king?

Absolutely there’s no point in comparing your relative wealth (or anyone else’s for that matter) to someone living in the Third World; or perhaps someone living homeless in the streets of some major city, just as there is no real point in comparing your own relative poverty to Bill Gates and other ultra-wealthy individuals.

Not only do people tend to make excuses for themselves for a variety of reasons, but making comparisons that are often the foundations those excuses are built upon is par for the course.

Making comparisons for comparison sake only feeds the ego, for good or ill, fertilizing those feelings personally within each of us towards the rapid growth of shame. Comparisons just become the express-lane-route toward destination unhappiness. Modern fashions, desires, and the unnatural need of constantly changing styles; these ideas created in the minds of consumers are not only the marketing strategy’s within advertising, but their goal is recreating the consumer into zombies, who’s actions are filled with emotional consumerism.

The Personal desire of products as advertised sets the pace of the modern rat race. Supplying products, those true needs of people defines exactly what it means to be a slow growth industry. For the sake of profiteering, business tends to feed the silent and personal addiction of making comparisons of one’s self and their current positions in life by comparison’s to others; by using their weapon–advertising. They market their products by any means possible. Through the use of advertising they drive profits by driving individual mind-sets towards a mindless emotional materialism.

There is a real difference between needs and wants?  Unfortunately, advertisements seem to be the pea soup thick fog separating the two in the minds of many.

Advertisement agencies along with their financial partner’s promote the popular over use of easy money, like credit cards to make purchases. All of which are responsible for changing, guiding, and directing, even navigating the human spirit, slowly at first, in the direction of materialistic greed. It doesn’t take long before we have real apathy towards our real needs. Tempted by believe, so we tell ourselves…. “We worked so hard, too hard in fact, to end-up neglecting ourselves or our wants.”

There is no surprise when we find ourselves in some department store, looking at whatever, not even thinking, that our closet at home already has several pairs of whatever in it–like shoes, clothes, or even an assortment of gizmos and widgets. When asked, what does that do? We stammer, pause, and then with a blank look, reply,” I don’t know! But it was priced right.”

It’s long been said that money can’t buy you love. But good credit in our modern world buys lots of doohickeys, the drug of feel-good self-love; a type of economic masturbation, and so like with most drugs, or addictions, those feel-good feelings only last so long and never seem to out-last our money in the bank.

Isn’t it time to let go of the empty desires for material things and immaterial things, rediscovering those honest differences between true needs and desirous wants?

With every monthly payment made on any number of credit cards that most consumers have in their wallets, the stress in the air always seems thickest on that day the payment is due. When on that day everyone should realize or at least face the facts, you’ve been crossing oceans for some people who wouldn’t even jump mud puddles for you. If you don’t agree? Check out your interest rate charges that you’re paying on those cards for the privilege of spending money you haven’t earned yet. People have become so used to making those card payments, it seems almost normal. But it isn’t at all. Credit cards have only been around since 1958,with the introduction of the dinner’s card.

If you would ask a person to dream a bit and tell you what they would do if they won the lotto? They would weave a colored tapestry of dreams. Ask that same person what they would do with all of the extra money if they wouldn’t have any credit-card payments to make? They would give you that look–as if your were asking them to swim across the Pacific Ocean.  There would be silence for a time, if the mind would only freely speak it peace, it would say—are you crazy! I wouldn’t have anything at all. Nothing! Nothing at all without credit cards. How life has changed in a few short years to believe that financial success requires someone to be in debt or suffer having nothing at all.

It’s no real surprise when people call up their credit card company hoping to get an extension of credit, or a lower interest rate; they act as if it’s just a small thing for a big company to do for them. Come on; just jump this little mud puddle for me…just this once? And when things are a bit tight for the month; making just that minimum payment is as wide of a swim as the Pacific Ocean.

Nobody seems to value time as the most valuable possession anyone has. No one sees that with every heart beat they’re giving someone else a piece of their lives. A paycheck doesn’t represent money alone; it represents a sold portion of one’s life. And so when we spend money frivolously on things we don’t really need, we are wasting a small amount of our lives, a portion of the grand sum total of limited heartbeats in our lives.

“The greatest gift to can give someone is your time. Because when you give time, it’s a portion of your life you can never get it back again.”

Yet with money people seem to think, “We can just work and make more.”

The credit card is that thief in your pocket, wallet, or purse, stealing your quality and quantity of time, your life; while charging outrageous sums for the privilege. The credit card is that temptation, that fertilizer that feeds the fires of neglect, apathy, and greed as it devours your time to live.

Oh how impatient people we have become. Willing to make a gamblers bet on our remaining time in our lives. Throwing away hours of life spent at work, a slave to credit.  If we only saved our time and time we spent working, to pay for those credit cards and interest charges when we were young. How much earlier in our lives would we have been able to stop working and start enjoying; not only with those things we could have purchased, but with savings we would have both time and those things to be enjoyed at our leisure.

The average person from the age of 20 to 60 spends 10-15% of their income on credit cards and finance charges, and another 10-15% on cars and trucks and those finance charges. That’s 20-30% of your income over a life time spent because you couldn’t wait, because you have plastic in your pocket. That works out to be 47.14 days worked in one year just to make those payments. That’s 5.16 years you could have retired earlier if you didn’t have those finance charges and would have saved something. Saving the money instead of spent it, not counting future time saved not having to work….. That would come out to $1,600,000.00 assuming a 7% compounding return on investments; in addition to all other retirement investments saved.

That plastic thief in your pocket—that famous advertising line that said, “What’s in your wallet?” That thief! Is trying to steal your potential, your time, and your life away from you. If you didn’t charge that extra $100 dollars on that card, but saved it, it would grow to over $8,000 dollars over a working life time.  Using the average income of today, you would have to work 7.1 weeks at 40 hours per week to make that 8K.

The average auto depreciated 40% from its purchase price in the first 2-3 years. The average car payment in America is $500.00 per month for 60 months of time. If you saved for 10 months, $500 per month, you could buy a $5,000 dollar car. If you continued to save that same amount, in 10 more months you could sell the 5K car and add the new savings to it and buy a 10K car. For cash! In 3 years of time from your first car purchase you’ll be able to buy a $20,000 dollar new car with zero payments. When the average person is driving that same kind of car, a 3-year-old car with 3 years still left to pay on it. Under the same assumptions in 3 years of time when the average person is finished paying for their new car, the saver would be buying a new $30,000 dollar car.

If your saying to yourself right about now, “that’s not so”. I think you should know….The average millionaire in America drives a 2-year-old auto and buys them for cash. In the example of saving $500 per month (That’s the average auto payment financed in America) you would be doing exactly as the millionaire does. Copying success! Working smarter not harder, so when that credit card asks what’s in your wallet? You can answer…CASH!

Credit cards are like a deck of cards. At first your relationship is all hearts and diamonds, but when the monthly bill comes, and your limits have met their limit, those cards become clubs and spade’s trying to bury you.