Some discussion about the Game of Filthy Lucre

[flexagon]

The Zen Habits blog had a "money hacks" post today:

http://zenhabits.net/2008/02/20-money-hacks-tips-and-tricks-to-improve-your-finances

and this is what I said in response to it.

There is a lot more to having a healthy relationship with money than just having more of it. Please don’t get me wrong — poverty is one of the worst things in the world, and to get out of it you need both good offense (making money) and good defense (not spending too much of it, which is what this post seems to be mostly about).

However, once you are at the point where money isn’t the limiting factor in life, there’s a whole new set of skills to be learned: how to invest instead of just letting money earn the amount to be had in a savings account, how to learn to LET yourself spend the amounts that are “safe” to spend instead of turning into a miser and never enjoying the fruits of all that scrimping and saving, how to use money for things that enhance happiness instead of simply piling up mounds of stuff, etc.

All the points in this post are essentially good points, in that they are helpful to some, and I’ve used variations on all of them over the years. However, some of them just stop making sense after a certain point. The “barter” technique doesn’t help anymore when time, not money, is the commodity that most limits your life. Cooking for oneself doesn’t help anymore when good food is available for free at work (granted, this one may only apply to a few people). Many people have already noted that using cash is a nice way to not earn interest on money, and it also keeps one from building up a good credit rating.

This post is nice as a beginning. I’d like to ALSO see one on how to live happily with money once one is above the poverty line.

I don't know if I said quite what I meant to say, but pretty close. Scrimping and saving will never get anyone the fiscal life of their dreams -- people imagine themselves "being rich", but I doubt they mean they want millions in the bank and a huge psychological block against spending more than $20 on groceries. Sometimes people say they want a large income, but I doubt they mean they want to live paycheck to paycheck with no security against the future, blowing through a million dollars every two weeks. No, living well with what you have is what's huge.

Offense: increase the amount you earn.
Defense: decrease the amount you spend.
Strategy: learn what to do with what you're not spending.
Tactics: learn how best to spend what you are spending.

Discuss?

Comments

[niralth.livejournal.com]

I unsubscribed from the Zen Habits rss feed because of posts like this: his advice is thoroughly rooted in his specific context, which is just too different from mine to be useful. Being thoroughly rooted in your own context is what we all are, for the most part, but when a blogger purports to be giving generalized advice for a wide audience I don't like to constantly feel like I'm an outsider.