I’m posting this for Kathleen
So what should you do to get rich?
Save your money. Save as much money as you possibly can. Every penny you can. Instead of coffee, drink water. Instead of going to McDonalds, eat Mac and Cheese. Cut up your credit cards. If you use a credit card, you dont want to be rich. The first step to getting rich, requires discipline. If you really want to be rich, you need to find the discipline, can you ?
If you can, you will quickly find that the greatest rate of return you will earn is on your own personal spending. Being a smart shopper is the first step to getting rich. Yeah you have to give things up and that doesn’t work for everyone, particularly if you have a family. That is reality. But whatever you can save, save it. As much as you possibly can. Then put it in 6 month CDs in the bank.
The first step to getting rich is having cash available. You arent saving for retirement. You are saving for the moment you need cash. Buy and hold is a suckers game for you. This market is a perfect example. Right at the very moment when cash creates unbelievable opportunity, those who followed the buy and hold strategy have no cash. they cant or wont sell into markets this low, that kills the entire point of buy and hold. Those who have put their money in CDs sleep well at night and definitely have more money today than they did yesterday. And because they are smart, disciplined shoppers, their personal rate of inflation is within their means. Cash is king for those wanting to get rich
The 2nd rule for getting rich is getting smart. Investing your time in yourself and becoming knowledgeable about the business of something you really love to do
It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are. Find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it.
It could be as a clerk, a salesperson, whatever you can find. You have to start learning the business somewhere. Instead of paying to go to school somewhere, you are getting paid to learn. It may not be the perfect job, but there is no perfect path to getting rich.
Before or after work and on weekends, every single day, read everything there is to read about the business. Go to trade shows, read the trade magazines, spend a lot of time talking to the people you do business with about their business and the people they buy from.
This is not a short term project. We aren’t talking days. We aren’t talking months. We are talking years. Lots of years and maybe decades. I didn’t say this was a get rich quick scheme. This is a get rich path
Now you wait for times of uncertainty and change in your business. The time will come. It may come quickly, it may take years and years. But it will come. The nature of our country’s business infrastructure is that it is destined to be boom and bust. Booms are when the smart people sell. Busts are when rich people started on their path to wealth.
You will know when that time is here for you because you will know your business inside and out. You will be ready because you will have been saving up for this moment in time
With all the change and uncertainty in the financial markets, there are people right now making more money than they ever dreamed of. They are the ones who have been living the real estate market and the financing behind it and understanding what actually what was going on. They re the one who understood the complexities of the credit markets. When everyone was following the crowd, they kept on saving their money and avoiding the temptation of groupthink.
Boom and busts happen to every industry. The question is whether you have the discipline to be ready when it happens for you ?
If you do, you will find out what it feels like to get lucky.
Goodbye to All That (no more revisions)
The first time I read Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to all that” – about her transitory life in New York, and her misery there —- I had just left New York to live in California.
I was very lonely in the West, and her words about being happy in Los Angeles, happier than in New York, where it seemed there were always so many promises that never came through, warmed me during one chilly evening in October when I started to miss home. I thought of her words as I drove to Big Sur and looked out over a high foggy peak into a mass of elephant seals. I thought of her words on my back in the sand in Santa Monica, peeling a tangerine, admiring a gaggle of surfers. The sea was stretched out in front of me as far as I could see. There were no strangers rushing through the rain and the cold, fighting for taxi cabs, no tall gothic buildings impeding the sun. But I was still very lonely. And something about California felt wrong.
Last night, almost 4 months re-settled back in Williamsburg Brooklyn, I came across a revision of Didion’s essay written by Eula Biss. Biss doesn’t state, smartly, in the beginning, that “New York might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different.” Biss does not understand, like Didion, that “Goodbye” is not about a place at all.
New York is neither a place for the rich nor the poor, it is neither a place for the young nor the old. You cannot feasibly write an essay about the largest city in America and determine, from your individual experience, who should live here and why those who live here do. You can make observations about your own interactions, your own loneliness, your bad apartment, your lack of a job. But, as Didion said, New York is “just a city.” You can be here living, or you can be here dying. Brooklyn or not, “where” you are in your twenties and how you feel is just a guise for how much or how little you know about who you are.
Big Mama. Venice, Calif. (07092011)
