An Apple Watch Ultra on the wrist and a maxed-out credit card is a common combination. Our financial situation is 80% psychology, not current resources.
Yesterday I wrote that if you invest money regularly and sensibly into the right tools, you can keep benefiting from those investments for a very long time.
I called those actions with a long tail of results.
And even though this all seems like plain common sense, most people don’t do it.
The moment someone starts earning even a little, new iPhones, hoverboards, a Sony PlayStation and a pile of other fun stuff appear in their life.
I often see an Apple Watch Ultra on the wrist of someone who is deep in the red on their credit card and waiting for payday to close the gap.
An important caveat: if a new phone or MacBook actually helps you earn more money, I’ll be the first to tell you to buy it.
But here I’m talking about situations where people feed not their work, but their insecurities.
For some people it’s critically important that everyone around sees their branded clothes, their Apple gear, their nice car. A person can spend years building that image while in reality being in debt or at zero.
That’s a very foolish thing to do — trying to impress other people while knowing full well that financially you’re drowning or standing still.
Someone may have no emergency fund at all, but they’ll have the latest MacBook — the one they play games on instead of earning money with.
Our financial situation is 80% our psychology, not our current resources or the circumstances of our life.
Do you agree that spending money to impress others, instead of investing in your own head or the right tools, is foolish at the very least?