Build Wealth

Why should you build wealth?

Seems like a silly question doesn’t it? I mean everyone wants more money, more freedom and less financial hardship right? You would think so but you really judge people more on their actions, then their thoughts or words if you want to truly understand them. When we judge America on our actions this is what I see…

  • Americans are constantly buying things they don’t need and often things they don’t even want just a few weeks or so after they buy them.
  • Americans are constantly buying things like this on high interest credit cards and paying 3-4 times the actual price or more and taking on debt designed to be short term and converting it into long term or lifetime cancerous debt by only paying minimums on credit cards.
  • Very few Americans buy homes on 15-20 year fixed rate mortgages deciding to instead take out 30 year mortgages in order to buy “more house”, the additional 10-15 years of interest is generally greater then the entire purchase price of the home.
  • Even though they know better Americans take out sub prime loans, adjustable rate loans and hybrid loans. Often not because they can’t qualify for a normal mortgage but simply so they can borrow larger amounts of money.

These and countless other actions are not the actions of people that have any real intention of building wealth. Yet I am not just picking on people here the very fact that we have so much opportunity or wealth in this nation with so few people actually doing so is part of my original question, “why should you build wealth”?

It won’t always be better tomorrow, it won’t always be “ok”.

There is only one logical reason we as a nation tend to act with such destructive behavior and that is the belief that we will always move up in income over time, that there will always be a job for us and that our economy will always be “ok” and I am here to tell you that is not the case. Personal or national or even world wide disaster can occur at nearly any time.

Let me put this in perspective for you! You are out at a store and see some 200 dollar thing you just have to have, you are short on cash but have the old Visa card at the ready. Another scenario, you do have the cash but the “thing” you have is not only not a necessity but you already have something that basically does the same thing, you just want the newest model. Last one, you are about to buy a house and you can’t get approved for a 200,000 dollar loan with good terms but your broker says he can do it with an ARM loan. Can you see yourself saying yes to any of those scenarios? If not think of some unnecessary spending you can see yourself doing and then answer this question…………

Would you buy the item, take the loan, etc. if you knew your company was going to fire you tomorrow and at the same time the value of your investments would be cut in half?

Now you don’t need to go back to 1929 and the depression to point this out in 2000, 2001 and 2002 this very thing happened to a lot of us. Now just 5 years later we are all acting like the lazy grasshopper again, fiddling away while winter looms and making fun of hard working ants. Will we never learn?

You don’t build wealth to live good, you build wealth to live good during bad times!