10 reasons you’re not rich….

[Coronita]

You folks see this? Kinda entertaining.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10345796/1/10-reasons-you-arent-rich.html

10. You Care What Your Neighbors Think

If you’re competing against them and their material possessions, you’re wasting your hard-earned money on toys to impress them instead of building your wealth.

9. You Aren’t Patient

Until the era of credit cards, it was difficult to spend more than you had. That is not the case today. If you have credit card debt because you couldn’t wait until you had enough money to purchase something in cash, you are making others wealthy while keeping yourself in debt.

8. You Have Bad Habits

Whether it’s smoking, drinking, gambling or some other bad habit, the habit is using up a lot of money that could go toward building wealth. Most people don’t realize that the cost of their bad habits extends far beyond the immediate cost. Take smoking, for example: It costs a lot more than the pack of cigarettes purchased. It also negatively affects your wealth in the form of higher insurance rates and decreased value of your home.

7. You Have No Goals

It’s difficult to build wealth if you haven’t taken the time to know what you want. If you haven’t set wealth goals, you aren’t likely to attain them. You need to do more than state, “I want to be a millionaire.” You need to take the time to set saving and investing goals on a yearly basis and come up with a plan for how to achieve those goals.

6. You Haven’t Prepared

Bad things happen to the best of people from time to time, and if you haven’t prepared for such a thing to happen to you through insurance, any wealth that you might have built can be gone in an instant.

5. You Try to Make a Quick Buck

For the vast majority of us, wealth doesn’t come instantly. You may believe that people winning the lottery are a dime a dozen, but the truth is you’re far more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery. This desire to get rich quickly likely extends into the way you invest, with similar results.

4. You Rely on Others to Take Care of Your Money

You believe that others have more knowledge about money matters, and you rely exclusively on their judgment when deciding where you should invest your money. Unfortunately, most people want to make money themselves, and this is their primary objective when they tell you how to invest your money. Listen to other people’s advice to get new ideas, but in the end you should know enough to make your own investing decisions.

3. You Invest in Things You Don’t Understand

You hear that Bob has made a lot of money doing it, and you want to get in on the gravy train. If Bob really did make money, he did so because he understood how the investment worked. Throwing in your money because someone else has made money without fully understanding how the investment works will keep you from being wealthy.

2. You’re Financially Afraid

You are so scared of risk that you keep all your money in a savings account that is actually losing money when inflation is put into the equation, yet you refuse to move it to a place where higher rates of return are possible because you’re afraid that you will lose money.

1. You Ignore Your Finances

You take the attitude that if you make enough, the finances will take care of themselves. If you currently have debt, it will somehow resolve itself in the future. Unfortunately, it takes planning to become wealthy. It doesn’t magically happen to the vast majority of people.

In reality, it is probably not just one of the above bad habits that has kept you from becoming a millionaire, but a combination of a few of them. Take a hard look at the list, and do some reflecting. If you want to be a millionaire, it’s well within your power, but you’ll have to face the issues that are currently keeping you from creating that wealth before you will have a chance to call yourself one.

[no_such_reality]

Number eight should be:

8. You’re overweight and you have bad habits. Nothing destroys and prevents wealth like excess weight. Smoking, drinking, and gambling run a solid second. The correlation between weight and bad eating habits that are ironically, quite expensive is fairly strong. Excess weight also damages your earning power, promotions and eventually, leads to catastrophic illnesses that will cripple your earnings, destroy your life and drain your wealth.

[UCGal]

[quote=no_such_reality]Number eight should be:

8. You’re overweight and you have bad habits. Nothing destroys and prevents wealth like excess weight. Smoking, drinking, and gambling run a solid second. The correlation between weight and bad eating habits that are ironically, quite expensive is fairly strong. Excess weight also damages your earning power, promotions and eventually, leads to catastrophic illnesses that will cripple your earnings, destroy your life and drain your wealth.[/quote]
This fatty disagrees. 🙂
I’m on track for early retirement and a paid off house. And I’m fat.

[barnaby33]

9. You are blissfully unaware of how wealthy you are because you’ve never spent time where people have truly lost hope. Your passport, assuming you have one has no stamps and you have no perspective.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=UCGal][quote=no_such_reality]Number eight should be:

8. You’re overweight and you have bad habits. Nothing destroys and prevents wealth like excess weight. Smoking, drinking, and gambling run a solid second. The correlation between weight and bad eating habits that are ironically, quite expensive is fairly strong. Excess weight also damages your earning power, promotions and eventually, leads to catastrophic illnesses that will cripple your earnings, destroy your life and drain your wealth.[/quote]
This fatty disagrees. 🙂
I’m on track for early retirement and a paid off house. And I’m fat.[/quote]

Well, this fatty is doing fine too, but you’re still wrong. Give it time, the weight (not the 5-10 lb kind), will get you. I’m talking the 40% over 40 that are obese and gaining. I’m 100% confident that if I don’t win my battle of the bulge, it will kill me and destroy my finances.

[nla]

[quote=barnaby33]9. You are blissfully unaware of how wealthy you are because you’ve never spent time where people have truly lost hope. Your passport, assuming you have one has no stamps and you have no perspective.[/quote]

What passport? Oh wait, you don’t have a passport.

[The-Shoveler]

Keeping healthy saves a lot; usually you don’t end up spending a lot of time in the hospital,

But I have noticed they usually don’t live that much longer than the out of shape types, they just tend not to have long illnesses, usually they just fall over dead one day.

[bearishgurl]

2 and 4 don’t make sense together. If one is “financially afraid” and wants to learn about how to invest their money, they would do well to use “qualified and vetted” professionals to help them invest properly. It’s not a sin to not know but it’s probably a sin to do nothing and thus make nothing due to fear (assuming growing your nest egg is important to you).

It also leaves out a few crucial “life events” which happen to everyone, at one time or another:

(1) death of a “breadwinner” spouse who could not get life insurance or could not get very much life insurance;

(2) having a “pre-existing condition” and thus be unable to secure an individual healthplan without being gouged;

(3) divorce, no matter who sued whom;

(4) having a child with special needs or one who is severely disabled from birth;

(5) having to support grandchildren into your old age due to their parent(s) being incompetent, indigent, incarcerated, addicted, critically ill or a combination of these factors exist;

(6) having an immediate family member who gets into a terrible accident and the other party at fault did not have insurance and the injured party’s UI/UIM coverage maxes out;

(7) having a family member get severely injured on the job and their employer’s worker’s comp coverage was insufficient to pay the lifetime medical bills of the injured worker;

(8) having a spouse who has a secret addiction and spends or gambles your assets away before you realize what happened;

(9) having a spouse who secretly converts joint-account proceeds to themselves or closes joint accounts and then can’t or refuses settle up with you when confronted;

(10) and, having an adult child who needs legal help and/or getting bailed out of jail, help obtaining necessary rehab for an addiction or help getting a divorce and/or child custody.

Believe it or not, a CA divorce judge isn’t going to give one whit about the damages one party suffered because 8 and/or 9 happened to them. This is a “community property” state and you are on your own. You should have left them sooner :-0

I could go on. There are SO MANY VARIABLES in life that if one does everything right and even keeps constant tabs on their finances, even just 1-3 of these events happening to a “millionaire” in their lifetime could wipe them out.

The article is a “pie-in-the-sky,” pollyanna, trite explanation for why people who “should be rich” are NOT rich.

[an]

BG, 2 & 4 makes total sense together. If you’re too afraid then you’ll be poor. But your solution is to let other manage your finances, you’ll probably be poor too. The correct solution is to learn about finances and get over your fear. It doesn’t hurt have other help you take care of your money but to have other take care of your money, that’s a different situation.

BTW, this list nails it. It doesn’t cover the exceptions, but it does a pretty good job nailing the vast majority.

[Coronita]

[quote=bearishgurl]2 and 4 don’t make sense together. If one is “financially afraid” and wants to learn about how to invest their money, they would do well to use “qualified and vetted” professionals to help them invest properly. It’s not a sin to not know but it’s probably a sin to do nothing and thus make nothing due to fear (assuming growing your nest egg is important to you).
[/quote]

Lol… You mean like Madoff?

Come on BG… You know very well, the best way for an average person to screw oneself is to hand over one’s finances to a “money manager” and be hands off…Because if you ever bothered to go to one of those money manager’s sell jobs (free dinner, free activity, blah blah blah), you would realize a “qualified” and “vetted” professional money managers really don’t exist if you yourself are clueless.

The only time “advisors” might work is if you pay them for advice, but ultimately the trigger finger is still you, you’re moves and your decisions, which still requires you to understand, research, weigh risk/reward, and make a decision. And unfortunately, if you’re always risk adverse and never pull the trigger, there’s no point in paying for advice that you won’t use…. If you don’t understand how to invest, turning the keys completely over to a money manager isn’t gonna help you get there any faster. In a lot of ways, it can be a lot worse.

The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing 🙂

[SK in CV]

[quote=flu]
The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing :)[/quote]

I think maybe our host on this blog might have a different opinion.

[Coronita]

[quote=SK in CV][quote=flu]
The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing :)[/quote]

I think maybe our host on this blog might have a different opinion.[/quote]

He’s different.

[an]

[quote=SK in CV][quote=flu]
The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing :)[/quote]

I think maybe our host on this blog might have a different opinion.[/quote]
Exception or the rule? How many can consistently say they beat the market?

[SK in CV]

[quote=flu][quote=SK in CV][quote=flu]
The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing :)[/quote]

I think maybe our host on this blog might have a different opinion.[/quote]

He’s different.[/quote]

Nice save.

[Coronita]

[quote=SK in CV][quote=flu][quote=SK in CV][quote=flu]
The only time money managers might be helpful is someone completely financially irresponsible..But chances are, those folks have nothing worth managing :)[/quote]

I think maybe our host on this blog might have a different opinion.[/quote]

He’s different.[/quote]

Nice save.[/quote]

What?

He’s different.

There’s a difference between getting advice (and paying for it) and being ignorant/risk adverse and turning the kingdom over to someone completely.

And a majority of money managers available to average joe do not have your best interest in mind.

You’re just full of nit picking aren’t you SK? 🙂

You know what. Forget it.. I take back what I say. I’m wrong. Most money managers for average joe are great at what they do. I think everyone should turn there money over to a complete stranger, completely count on them, never try to understand what they are getting themselves into, listen to whatever money manager says as 100% accurate..And in the unlikely scenario that the investment/speculation blows up, call up our government and ask for a bailout…Seems to work for real estate.

[Author]

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