Well its the weekend and I am sitting in my thinking chair looking out a window overlooking the back yard into one of the bison paddocks. The herd is ambling along grazing and resting following each other and the light bulb came on for me. And that light was how we as people tend too a lot of the time have that same herd mentality about some things.
And one of those is debt in an earlier post I had talked about reasons for why we get into debt. And one of those reasons was the keeping up with the Jones’s scenario. Simply it means the desire or want for material things because my neighbor has them or my friends or other family members have them. What also adds to this like gas to a fire is if you have a decent job making decent money banks and finance companies are all to happy to help you make that purchase for a extended amount of monthly payments.
If not looked into and not much effort put into shopping around for interest rates and also not much of a down payment a person can easily end up paying for the purchase they made twice over. So another way to look at this in a simple fashion is figure out your hourly rate even if your on salary and then take the amount of hours you need to work to pay off the purchase you plan on making and double it. Does it seem like a such a good idea now?
Now another item that comes into play or for me I think of it more like a commodity and the most valuable commodity is TIME. When your in your 20s you think you have tons of it, you get to your 30s and you think well I should start thinking about saving for retirement, building wealth etc. You hit your 40s and its like BOOM!!!! someone hit you with a Mack truck looked behind and decided to back up over you again.
As of now the idea of retirement is starting to sink in and you realize that 25 years from now is when typically your supposed to be living the good life and its all going to be pink umbrella drinks, sandy beaches, golf 6 days out of 7 with the one day off being washing the luxury car and filling it up with gas to be ready for next week. HAHA!!! or whatever it is you have envisioned for your retirement I am reciting what pictures I usually see associated with retirement when reading articles on MSN Money etc. The main things I want to end this post with as they will be discussed in future posts are the topics of DEBT and TIME and what they mean to you.
Till next read cheers,
GFW
Herd Mentality