Many people believe money is the embodiment of material wealth and allegedly personal freedom. Regardless of our sophistication and education, we are typically swept up with this misrepresentation. We seek financial well-being anywhere we can find it. Those of us without real cash reserves or large disposable incomes mistakenly replace what we lack in funds with expensive lines of credit. We leverage what we have in order to acquire what we seek to possess.
Unfortunately many of us confuse what we want with what we believe we need. We accumulate indiscriminately. We oftentimes compound matters by purchasing material goods that have little or no long term value with leveraged cash obligations that increase over time. Herein is the beginning path of many a person to their eventual financial doom. Unfortunately in order to accumulate wealth in our society, we need capital. We need to grow our money through investments of appreciating value; we need discipline, luck, time, and a particular mindset.
Our personal response to money determines how successfully we can use it to the best advantage. Notice how the inherent concept in this last sentence was to USE money toward some further end. Money does not, in itself, give us wealth and freedom; it is actually only a vehicle to achieve it. We need to understand the emotions that affect our decisions about how we use money in order to improve ourselves and gain a greater prosperity and well-being. Few people would argue that if we ran our lives like a home-based business, our emotional approach as a successfully owner/operator to money would probably have a more utilitarian perspective.