Why You Don't Have What You Want
You don’t deserve to have nice things if you haven’t worked for them. There I said it. If that offended you then you probably need to keep reading. The only things you deserve in life are basic human dignity (the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake , and to be treated ethically), food (not restaurants), water (not Starbucks), shelter (not owning your own home), and clothing (not an entire wardrobe full of name brands and 30 pairs of shoes). I am talking the bare essentials, the bare bones necessities are the only thing that you deserve just by being, the rest works on a “if you want it go earn it” basis and even though you may not like that idea it is reality. If you haven’t earned the money to buy things then you don’t have a right to have them simply by existing. We all have our moments of feeling entitlement, where we think we deserve to have something that we haven’t worked to earn. However you need to resist this feeling in order to achieve your important goals in life.
Everything is an exchange of energy. You expend energy in the form of work to make money. You are then exchanging your money (energy) for things. Everything in life is a trade off. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Balance in everything is the way nature was made and we are nature. As far as we have put ourselves from them, we cannot get away from the laws of nature. They rule us if we know it or not. Every time you say yes to something you are in essence saying no to everything else that energy could give you.
Our resources are finite and its your job and no one else’s to decide how to spend your money. If you want to go out to eat every night and go to the movie theater once a week and buy those new shoes and lease a fancy car you can. But if you are upset that you don’t own a home it’s because you choose those things over a house. You can decide to only give your money to the most truly important things in your life and you will find you are able to afford more of those things when you stop spending your money/energy on other things.
If you think of your finances as a pizza, then the pizza size is how much money you make and that is what it is. You can pick and choose which slice goes to which pursuit but it doesn’t change the size of the overall pizza. If you give 2 slices to clothing that means you have 2 slices less to spend on other things. Credit has fooled us into thinking that we can just make the pizza bigger but in reality all it does is take a slice out of your next 10 pizzas and until you pay that debt off you will continue to give your slices away.
Before I paid off my credit cards and cut them up I realized something that made me really angry. On my credit card I was paying for a steak I ate 3 months ago, a cute shirt I bought 6 months ago, and a movie I watched 6 weeks ago. I was spending all my money in the now on things that I had already enjoyed, consumed, and moved onto the next. It made me mad to think I couldn’t afford to buy a steak dinner now because I had to pay for the steak dinner I ate 3 months ago plus interest. When you only buy things that you can pay for in cash (or on your debit card with the funds in your account) then you have a freedom, those things are yours and you own them. Now you may say that the shirt you bought on your credit card is yours, you own it and the credit card company is not going to take it away from you. That’s true but they are going to take what you paid for the shirt plus interest from you so in essence they are taking away your ability to buy something else instead.
If you can’t pay for it upfront then you don’t deserve it. When you buy things on credit they end up owning you instead of you owning them.
My student loans were like a chain around my neck. I had earned my degree already but was locked into giving $300 plus dollars a month to them and that was barely taking down the principal after it was all said and done. I got mad at that loan and told it that I was gonna kick its butt and never have to think of it again. So within 7 years of graduating college I had paid off all my student loans. People have told me many times, “You can’t pay off your loans” or “just get used to them” or “they will be around forever”. But that is only true if you believe it. I dared to believe that I could be different, that I could pay off my loans and never have to worry about them again, and because I believed it, I behaved in a way that made it reality. I had to work very hard and say no to a million different things I wanted because my focus and goal was to pay off my debt.
Focus is KEY. With focused effort we can achieve SO much. If you can narrow the distractions (other things you want to spend your money on) and focus all of your attention on 1 goal you can achieve incredible results. That is the magic of the 7 Baby Steps I teach. You are totally focused on the step you are on until you get to the next step then you completely focus on that step on and on until you have reached the summit. Then you can look down on your stairway of achievement and be proud of how far you have come. I went from living in my father-in-law’s basement $30,000 in debt, with nothing to show for it except a business degree to having a 6 figure net worth in 7 years. What do you think you can push yourself to accomplish?