today I started a list: things I'll do when I'll have a lot of money.
I understood how used I am to being so close to poverty when I wrote stuff like a 20 bucks bluetooth speaker and a set of screwdrivers.
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@arteteco the difference between a rich person and a poor person is that a rich person spends most of their time trying to think of ways they could spend/invest money they don't have yet, a poor person thinks up ways they will spend money they don't yet have :)
Though I think this applies a bit farther above the poverty line than you are dealing with too. Obviously you gotta cover the basic needs first. but someone told me that once and it stuck with me.. how you spend (in your head) the money you dont have yet says everything about your financial future.
Thats just pure hyperbole and not really what was said at all. Obviously simply having a thought will not fix the problem. However patterns of thinking reflect patterns of action. How you plan to spend money you don't yet have is an indication of how you will spend that money when the time comes that you do have it. Thoughts alone may not get you from rags to riches, but when those thoughts represent your financial plans for the future or in general then absolutely and of course it will be an indicator of financial success to some degree.
With that said there needs to be more than just positive thoughts and there are absolutely external factors that may work for or against you as well.
@freemo @arteteco Sorry if I’m salty over it, but people have been repeating the same tired old argument for so long, that it’s not their fault for being super rich, and if I support their exploitive system, then one day I too may be rich beyond compare! It’s both excusing the crimes that the rich can get away with because of the imbalance of power, and blaming the poor for their own oppression.
Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter, and the vast majority of financial ruin is due to the actions of others. What you’ve been led to believe that I have to do to stop being poor is either something that the richest among us have never had to do, or else it’s a rigged game with uncountable millions who’ve spun that same wheel of fortune and got nothing but regrets in return.
I haven't read the whole thread, but I just wanted to reply to:
> Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny
I don't know about the "tiny" part. I have some anecdotal experience with seeing two different people become millionaires independently (one relative, one friend), and taking up their whole family up with them, after being extremely poor people literally selling cheap clothes on the sidewalk to afford food at one point (both of them did that for some weird cosmic coincidental reason).
Both people had starkly different behavior from anyone around them; mainly extreme risk taking, and very strong workaholism. And I mean that in a very pronounced way, like, take for example the relative, whom I know more about. While other poor family members were trying to "find a job" or "wait for the next paycheck", or whatever, that guy was literally sneaking up to war-torn countries to organize shipments of goods and drive them under direct artillery fire. Every venture that person organized was totally funded by someone else, he would talk to many people, and convince them to fund the craziest of ideas, and on many occasions traveled to other countries without having the money to come back. He got shot at least one time. He was attacked with bats by some Ukrainian mafias at some other point. At his height he owned a manufacturing company of a few thousand employees in China, which he founded himself to produce goods which he sold to his home country, and its neighbors. He had many branches around the world, a handful of villas, and a bunch of land here and there.
I don't know how much of that is inherent personal traits, how much of it conscious change. I know, from older relatives, that this person was never like that initially, and his personality was very different up to some point where he kinda changed. I don't know how he changed though.
Personally, I've also seen huge changes in my material condition directly tied to changes in mindset and "hard-work" (I kinda hate the term). And I was sure to note that the mindset changes came first (often introduced by meeting people who became "my role model", but mostly through the internet and books tbh), and it caused me to initiate the exploration in search of chances, and the exploitation of chances found.
Well, but here's the kicker, both of those people are no longer millionaires, both of them lost most of their wealth. One to the financial crisis of 2008, and one to the current Covid-19 pandemic.
Such anecdotes seem to me to show that "everyone has HUGE influence over their financial situation", but also "The world can Completely Destroy You, in a blink of an eye". It seems to be possible to explain this overall with the "the higher the risk, the higher the reward" kinda thing. And don't just skim over the "risk" part. The other family members who remained relatively poor never took such massive risks, but they never faced "millions of dollars in debt and shot in the chest by some random mafia" either. Low risk, low reward.
Of course this is all anecdotal evidence, and it's not enough for ultimate conclusions. So take of it what you will. I think that there are tons of outside factors, but it's one's own choice whether to optimize for safety and stability, or to optimize for risk taking and opportunity. Choose the wrong thing to optimize for, at the wrong time, and you're dead. And you can't know for certain what the wrong time is.
Ain't life so much fun /s
Its a complex topic. As a general rule high-risk means your money will move, up or down, at a faster rate than low risk. They are neither inherently good or bad but can result in people loosing or gaining wealth int he blink of an eye if don't indiscriminately.
If someone is to become wealthy, and do so in a way that is likely to be stable and pass that wealth on for multiple generations, then it requires a lot of study and understanding of many things, one of which (and that a lot of schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs) is risk management. No one teaches you to take less risk, risk is good, but they do teach you how to manage risk to ensure that the risk works for you and not against you.
The people you describe sound like people who most of the elements to make it plus some really good luck that turned on them later... They did the hard work to invest in themselves, to move up, to grow their company. But by the sound of it they never did the hard work around study and knowledge needed to be proficient at keeping it or how to handle risk. Basically they had just enough of the equation to be dangerous, enough to make it when the stars align, but not enough knowledge to know to secure, keep or manage that wealth once they grew large enough to have wealth at all.
Sadly this is common, self-made millionaires often loose their money because they skipped a few essential skills and got there more by determination, hard work, and risk taking, with little study and expertise, you really need both.
Fair, I dont really know the individuals you speak and it could very well have been just shitty luck and circumstances too. But my point is that it is fairly typical for people who are self made millionaires to have a hard time keeping and perpetuating their wealth unless they did a lot of study about money management before hand.
yup, agreed.
and I know you don't know those people, so I'm not trying to make them look better or something :]
My point was that no amount of study about money management can save you from sudden catastrophic system failures. Still, you should do that as not to fail from the silliest of mistakes, like forgetting to keep track of the interest on your loans or whatever.
Another more extreme example I've witnessed was Syria. We had a total brutal civil war. In some cities, every single business was absolutely, and literally, destroyed. Door to door massacres, heavy artillery, chemical weapons. You get the point.
> but not enough knowledge to know to secure, keep or manage that wealth once they grew large enough to have wealth at all.
Well, I don't know about that. Both lost their wealth to very extreme abnormal circumstances. Much more powerful and knowledgeable entities lost to the 2008 crisis. Same can be said of the current Covid crisis.
Yes, many millionaires don't know how to keep their wealth, many probably lose their wealth to silly mistakes, but to those two's credit, they withstood a lot of different smaller hits, and it took a hell of a hit to take them down.
> pass that wealth on for multiple generations
This one is a though one. Despite the mindset of my relative, almost none of the family around him possessed it, or understood it. This lead to them wasting a lot of money on silly things, and none of them would actually know how to generate the wealth or maintain it.
That person probably did not want to feel selfish and ungenerous, especially since he constantly was away from his family, and that made him turn a blind eye to their many money wasting expenditures, and useless displays of wealth just to show off their riches.
It kinda disgusts me when people become too proud of wealth they did not make, and waste money that someone else worked hard for on bullshit, and exploit the person's feelings of duty and love.
Other than that, yeah, risk-management.
Everything you wrote, is well said :]