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?