I used to think chronically poor people were just financially ignorant. Nowadays I am beginning to realize they may be closer to financially depressed. For the past eight years, I have been living (way) below my means. As a result, I was able to quit my job and self-financed a return to school. Although I have money in my name, I have no current income, so living below my means would leave me without basic necessities.
It occurred to me when I was making another cash payment for my house that those payments were starting to feel as though they were getting closer and closer. Most recently, I was tempted to take the $2.02 from my overpayment and buy something entirely frivolous (specifically a candy bar) since it would mean more to me now than it would mean to my mortgage in the long run. I equated the thought immediately with countless tales and occurrences I have heard and seen; all concepts that I never quite understood before that urge.
From this point onward, I may be way off-base. Now I don't plan to drain my portfolio to find out, but it seems to me that coming into money is where most people make missteps, overvaluing the security of the sum, and the inevitable splurging puts them right back where they have always been. In its most extreme form, it's seen as the "curse of the lottery." I once heard the description that money will not change a person, it will just lead them to be more themselves. Honestly, I still don't know what to think about the financial yo-yo, where people catch a break and spend it on themselves before they have to give it to others in the form of payments (usually for items that they have already purchased). All I can do is thank God that I was born to a father who knew otherwise.
In the simplistic words of John "Bradshaw" Layfield in Have More Money Now, "you can have when you have." I believe what the financially depressed are truly under-valuating is how the money that they're turning over to others before they even get their own hands on it is repayment for a pleasure that has already been received (and maybe already forgotten). Whether they are paying off a mortgage or a car loan, all the way down to the more forgettable purchases made on a credit card. There is an innate dissatisfaction when you get something before it has been earned.
Not that I am faulting people who fall into this mindset. At least once, I was one of them.
