What Pays The Bills?

[thomm225]

Originally Posted by Group9

Well, you're right. If poor people would make the same financial decisions that rich people made, most would be rich, too. But, I learned a long time ago, that I can't make people do what I want them to do, the poor included. Even simple lessons like, "Make one dollar and spend 90 cents equals economic prosperity. Make one dollar and spend one dollar, equals financial disaster" are often lost.

I don't think it's wrong to be unsympathetic when people reap the consequences of their own free will financial decisions. I've certainly made some bad ones and I never thought that somebody with more money than me, owed me a duty to give me money to erase that bad financial decision I made. Poor people think their problem is not enough income production, when it is really almost always, their problems with income management.

I use my former step-daughter (who is as good an example of bad choices equals bad outcome as I know).

She constantly says she is unable to save money, yet she smokes two packs of cigarettes a day. I sat down with a calculator with her over and over again, trying to show her what $10 a day saved and invested would mean in her life. But, her gift and her curse, is that she can't see more than five minutes into the future. On one hand, it keeps her from worrying about anything (I've never known anyone as stress free as she is). On the other hand, it keeps her from seeing how her future could be better if she made better decisions now.

I can't change that, but I refuse to subscribe to the notion that because I can't change that, and she won't change, that I am somehow beholden to support her the rest of her life. There is a psychological term for thinking that you are in charge of other people and must save them from what you believe are their bad choices. It's called co-dependency and it's in the DSM for a reason. It is a mental illness.

Those that want to help believe society as a whole will be better when there are less poor, uneducated people.

Some of us are detail oriented. It's easier for us to handle money than say an artist type person. The old left brain, right brain thing.

We can beat this to death for hours, but just check out your local convenience store in the morning. Your bust ass hourly worker guys are getting their crappy breakfast there and paying top dollar.

That's just a small example. The same guys may eat out tons more than folks that know how to save, but they were probably brought up this way.

I don't have the answer I just hate to see generation after generation have the same problems their parents had. I believe some of the kids today just having access to computers at the public library may be able to pull themselves out of the that lifestyle.

After years of school, work, living, I'm finally learning how to write, read, listen, recognize a beautiful sunset, the certain ways light reflects off the water at a specific time in the late afternoon, etc. I was told how terribly hard algebra, trig, calculus was going to be but I never had any trouble with them. I once got a B on a calculus midterm and I was still quite drunk from the night before. But, I couldn't write a decent essay to save my life.

Point is we are hardwired with certain abilities.

My son is the T-total opposite of me so we have been teaching each other the other's way. It's amazing how different people can be.

[Randyonr3]

Honestly, I'm a professional "Goof Off" or at least it seams that way and I've always believed life it to short for a fulltime job..

When I get bored with something, I look and often find something else to fill the gaps. I've owned and sold more businesses than I can count, I've been a photographer, a welder, building inspector, owner of a bodyshop, a fab shop, and a marine canvas business,

Owned a bicycle shop, a motorcycle shop, and Trick-Fabrications, a custom van conversion business.

I've made money in the stock market, worked in the oil fields, the pot-ash mines, welded pipelines in Alaska, and been a captain of a fishing trawler.

In my early days I spent time going to school in Berkley, got a degree, sold a mass amount of drugs, did some time in Jail, and went to Woodstock.

So my cruising days, which started about 12 years ago, are NOT a retirement action as it is just another venture in my long list of things I'm doing, which will include my next venture of writing a book or two, doing a lot of coastal and off-shore fishing,,, And Just "Goofing Off"