OK, I was all set to tell JD Roth (at Get Rich Slowly) that wealth comes from your actions, not from some ‘magical millionaire mind-set’ when I clicked PLAY on this video by the author of a book that JD was reviewing on his site …
… the video actually hit home!
I remember some distinct financial flashpoints that helped to set me on my financial path … for better or worse:
1. My dad waking me up in the middle of the night to go and watch our shop burning down
2. My dad telling me our (bad) financial situation
… not one event, but a series with the common theme: we were living beyond our means.
This hit home, and I resolved never to be a financial burden on anybody …. never to hold my hand out … and, so on. From a young age, I held down after school jobs, bought my own clothes, saved up for my own cars, paid for my own trips, and so on.
This is not unusual; many – most – of you probably had to do the same. And, we were not totally ‘poor’ … my dad could eventually solve most of his financial problems by going to other, wealthier relatives for hand-outs.
But, what made it a little different for me was that my dad hid all of this from my mother and my sisters … THEY believed that we lived a ‘normal’ upper-middle-class lifestyle. I actually lived in a different ‘financial house’ to the one in which they lived, even though we shared the same 4 walls!
No doubt, these experiences go a long way to explain why I am independently / self-made wealthy today, and to this day, the females in my family still live off hand-outs.
Yes, there are financial flashpoints that help to explain my ‘wealth motivation’, maybe you would like to share yours?
That is so true
Thanx for sharing
It can be difficult to resent those with money at times, like seeing a young kid in a corvette or whatever the case may be. There are a select few or maybe more that reside their self worth in the things they have. Yet I have learned that it’s just a number, it is like water and you must let it flow. In a sense you are pushing that which you desire away from you, when you resent these things. Not meaning to take a spiritual side on you here. I grew up in a very educational household where all my family has a degree. This is pushed on me so much…yet no one is wealthy. The only wealthy person was my late uncle who survived the holocaust and built his own clothing business into a million dollar business. So yes I value education, yet I feel there still is something else to it. But yes, beliefs and flashpoints in one’s life can make or break you. Have to find the good and bad and learn to break the bad ones.
I believe Flash points are more than just a once in your life even that drives you to think differently than others about how ,when , where to spend or invest your money.
I’ve had many flash points throughout my life time,which serves to tell me, I need to do things differently than others I know.
Very true.
My own flash points were a series of events relatively early in life – watching two wealthy relatives blow substantial inheritances through a combination of bad investing and high living, working for a finance company dealing with defaulting borrowers, begining my legal career in the middle of a major recession and seeing first hand the consequences when people fail financially and a few more.
I also got to watch some people lay the foundations of what grew to be multi-million dollar fortunes by being bold enough to seize the opportunities that times of economic difficulties presented.
T’d like to feel that I learned lessons from all these experiences.
@ William – those holocaust survivors are a tough bunch! Similar background over here, except mine used the cashflow from their slightly-less successful clothing business to buy property.
My flashpoint was my first job out of high school at $5 per hour and my first Engineering job, making $43k a year. I figured out very early that I want to have an income stream to replace working as I wanted to have the option to walk away. 20 years later from my $5 per hour job I am still working but have enough put away that I don’t feel like I’m a slave to my job.
-Mike
You don’t feel like a slave to your job,but it took you 20 or more years to reach that point. for some of us,these lessons would have been nice at a younger age, so we wouldn’t be a slave to our jobs. But ,the idea here,is to show us all how to reach that point,cause without this info,many of us will never reach that point.