Big TV or Big Library

Money Minded

“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.”

-Zig Ziglar

This is something I heard in my early adult years, and it has stuck with me ever since. I think because the more I see and learn, the more I find this to be true.

Most people desire to have the bigger expensive things, but many are not willing to put in the time and energy to appropriately afford those things. Most people have a hard time seeing past today and are willing to spend their futures now to buy their “wants” (mostly liabilities), potentially even going into debt for them.

To me, finances always seemed pretty cut and dry, like first-grade math (simple addition and subtraction). I thought I knew almost everything there was to know; work hard, spend little, and save lots, but when I really started diving into learning how money works, I found there is so much more to becoming wealthy.

Robert Kiyosaki says, “One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle-class struggles in debt is that the subject of money is taught at home, not in school. Most of us learn about money from our parents. So what can poor parents tell their children about money? They simply say, “Stay in school and study hard.” The child may graduate with excellent grades, but with a poor person’s financial programming and mindset.”

Do you want to be someone who complains about the system, or do you want to be someone who learns how it works and how you can take advantage of opportunities? I’ve always heard that you become who you hang out with, so if you want to learn to be better at something, you should hang out with people who are good at that something. Read books, listen/watch podcasts, or find people who are good with money and learn what they did. Learn how they made and invested their money. Learn what purchases they made and how they made them. Learn how they created and ran their businesses. Learn how they found ways to legally decrease their taxable income. Learn!

The best thing we can do for our children is to learn so we can teach them how to have this “minority mindset”, as my favorite YouTube financial teacher, Jaspreet, would say. This is a mindset of desiring to learn how to make money work for them rather than wasting their money (and futures) on liabilities.