I have this little quote on my desk wall between two pictures, a 348 and me posing next to my uncles previous Testarossa, and the quote reads…
The secret to life
Is not to have
Everything you want
But to want
Everything you have
The reason I share this is because most people when they start making good money they tend to want everything now. They buy a big house and in the span of 4-6 years they buy lots of stuff like really expensive furniture, huge plasma TV’s, get a pool, get a pool table in the basement (if you guys have basements). Then they buy a boat or a bike or both, buy dirt bikes or ATV’s, then go on exotic vacations once or twice a year, run up credit cards, buy really expensive watches/purses…and then don’t want to get rid of anything because they now have this standard way of life and then say…I want a Ferrari now, but cant because they already owe 300K to 400K + in debts.
Some people say well that’s not going to happen to me. Well it does…I have a high middle class salary and so does my wife and together we make over 6 figures but we are not wealthy. I have a regular home, not high class fancy but definitely not a dump, with a regular yard no pool. I have regular furniture, I could have taken a 6K leather set for the living room but why? The non leather ones we chose are very good, I have a 32 inch regular tube TV not a 4K LCD or plasma. It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just I don’t feel the need to spend that much. We take vacations but don’t go on cruises or resorts and spend 5-6K. We stay home and relax, sleep in, do nothing, whatever. My wife and I see it like this…why spend 6K for pictures? Because that’s what you get for 2 weeks, one in Florida and one on a ship. And everyone wants to drive a big new luxury car and sometimes two. You rarely see a house with a BMW 7 series and a Toyota Corolla in the driveway. People have image problems and this prevents them from getting what they truly want.
So it all depends on what you want in life. I have had my house for 6 years, do I have debts…yes, but my mortgage is half paid off. Most people take 10+15 years to do that, it all depends on you and how much you get influenced by friends, family and neighbors. What I mean by that is a neighbor buys a 15 ft above ground pool, and then you see a few weeks or months later the next neighbor buys a 21 ft pool and so on. One buys a new car the other buys a new SUV etc. My wife wants a new bedroom sets, holy shit 10K for some sets we saw, they were amazing, but to us not worth the price, a 2K set will be fine (once we decide on the right one).
Since my wife doesn’t care about a big house, fancy car, luxury museum interior, or expensive jewelry or high fashion bran name clothes, I chose to be car poor not house poor. Let me explain. I pay 1K a month for my house and property taxes together (1600 square foot home and 1100 square foot heated garage seperate from our house), I bought new in 2004 a big expensive truck that will be paid in 2 years with only 29,000 miles on it, it’s still new…Now I have friends who buy used, 6-10 year old cars sometimes 2 (with 90+ miles on them) and sometimes a new regular 13K cars but have homes 2-3 times bigger than ours (3-4K square foot homes) and pay $2500 to $3500 per month. They have all the luxuries, pool tables, in ground pools, hot tub and furnishing that looks like the house of the rich and famous, they play poker every weekend for money, drink lots of beer, and some of them still get high. On top of it all they go on 2 trips a year and wonder how I can afford my truck ?!?!?! and when I speak about Ferrari’s and how I plan to go about it they look at me like a dog listening a high pitched sound…..they have no clue…It’s sad how so many people (even in the corporate world) still do drugs and waste tons of money on beer….
Well my two cents turned out to be 4 bucks…..lol
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