I was speaking with a friend who has been laid off from their job and is planning on selling a Corvette they have as a third car. He informed me that he only drives it every six months or so and that he and his wife only bought it because of a youthful desire to own a vette. He continued on that when he was working he could afford to just have the thing sitting around for his enjoyment twice a year. Let me tirade here: not against my friend but about me and you.
1) How often do we buy things only because we wanted them at a different point in our lives. We have taken selfish to an entirely new level when we wish to feed all of the desires of our past even if they no longer exist in the present.
2) How often do we say we can afford to be wasteful because we have excess. He could afford the car (which was no less wasteful then rather than now) when he was making excess money. We can afford to goof off in college when we have excess time. We can be generally dummies when we have an excess of safety warnings.
3) How come we do not do simple math in our lives (and I never passed a math class in my four years of real college, sorry community college, we both know your not real). Take the $10k he can sell this car for. He is making $10k in extra payments on his other car, at 10% interest that is $1,000 a year, or $500 for each use of the Corvette (2x per year).
Point of the story, it stinks when we have to get laid off before we make good financial decisions. It stinks when we have to get divorced before we realize how we treated our spouse. It stinks we are so afraid our kids are going to make the same mistakes we made we try to hide the world from them and in their ignorance they turn out just like us. I'm going to try and just breath and make better decisions now, while I'm still married to a wonderful woman, while my child is still young and innocent, while I still have a business that put's food on the table.
Good post. Excess, what a waste. This is why the stock market crashed, why police in Lonetree unnecessarily drive Hummers, why we create huge man-made middens. As I sit in the hottest day in Nov (103F) thinking why is it that as you put it 'afford excess.' That's just it afford, the consequential repremands for our actions don't cause enough fear, nor do most people make the conscious decision to make a personal choice about what it is they want from life so they sway with the ebb and flow of society and let others think for them. So in short why is there excess? My personal answer is money, the fictional note of perceived power, a genetic bandaid. It allows people to afford treating others as excess, removing integrity and respect as adjectives describing character. I don't think that is where you were going but I've recently had some run ins with people who choose not to treat others as they want to be treated, plus the heat increases my temprement exponentially.
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