Financially Speaking, I’ve Seen It All
Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah
I’ve lived long enough to experience numerous recessions, inflation, rising and falling interest rates, scams, crypto currencies, retirement funds, IRAs, pensions, blah, blah, blah, blah …
The financial saga goes on and on.
I’ve seen friends lose money, gain money, throw money away, and live so far above their means that if you subtracted their debt from their assets they’d be minus zero.
I’ve heard that cash is king and lived long enough to witness a cashless society.
I know people intimately who endured the Great Depression and I watched my friends and relatives go through the 2008 crash and the Great Recession.
I’ve watched homes get bigger and bigger and garages fuller and fuller of junk.
I’ve dodged a few financial advisors. Whew!
I’ve watched people lose their homes and money right before retirement and a growing number of people unable to retire.
Of course, there’s always been the super rich.
They live in a parallel universe where they can get huge loans from big banks even though they’re deeply in debt. Somehow they tend to end up living the high life no matter what.
After a lifetime of watching people do what they do with money, I still keep it simple.
No debt and lowest overhead possible. The less money I have going out for monthly expenses, the less I have to worry about.
No debt.
Zero was my goal. That’s what I worked for and I wanted it as early in life as possible. I keep my money in local banks or credit unions where I can walk through the door and talk to someone face to face.
No big banks for me! No, thank you.
I diversify by burying some of my money in the ground, figuratively speaking. So, rather than ask the bankstahs to hang on to all of my hard earned and equally hard to save money, I buy land, but not just any type of land.
I buy land above the 45th parallel where most scientists agree that the new prime properties of the future will be located.
I like land, but I don’t want land that will have no water in the future. Nor do I want land that will have too much water. Flooding spoils the value of the land. So, I’m pretty picky about what I buy. I really do feel pretty damn good when I finally find a piece of land that fits the bill.
Yeah, I’ve seen it all and I’m not too impressed with any of it.
I’m not impressed with opulence either. You can take your castle and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Me? I want smaller and easier to heat, clean, furnish, and manage.
As a last bit of insurance in an uncertain world, I keep my freezer and cabinets full of food.
I also invested in a means to keep my freezer operational if I should lose power. It’s the little things that make me feel all snug as a bug in a rug when the wind is howling.
Don’t knock it until you try it. Especially living debt free. You have no idea how reaching that one simple goal will make you feel.
Freedom! Now there’s a word that you hear everywhere you go, yet if there’s one thing that’s robbing Americans of freedom, it’s consumer debt.
We’ve settled for a life of indentured servitude instead.
Stuff is so overrated. You gotta earn the money to buy it. Then, you gotta find a place to put it. You gotta remember to use it. Sometimes you’ve gotta pay to fix it. And, when you die your loved ones have to figure out what the hell to do with it.
So, pay off that debt instead and find a way to keep your overhead as low as possible. Owe no man anything but love. You can thank me later.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
