My Fellow Compassionate Capitalists:
As a child of the 70s and 80’s I grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp as well as Ronald Reagan talking about pride in America.
Lee Iacocca…. The Pride is Back commercials.
Mom, baseball, and homemade apple pie!
My dad instilled in me that if I was not providing for my family I could not call myself a MAN!!
I took that to heart as he was my example and I ended up believing I was invincible and worked 90+ hour weeks destroying my body in construction doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
I was told that I was going to regret this and I would end up a crippled old man… but when you cannot envision past next week… “old man“ seems forever away!
I naïvely and vigorously protesting while on my way to financial blessings from teachings provided by a white collared financial mentor of mine. He saw that I had the drive and determination necessary if I would just use my mind instead of my blue color brute force. My body did give out on me at age 40 but I was fortunate enough to have embraced my mentors financial mentality and I retired.
Retirement takes money….. not age. While the money was there I was bored out of my mind and I started going to auctions. I absolutely fell in love with the auction scene and getting caught up in the excitement and frenzy of bidding wars. Unfortunately at first this cost me as I ended up spending a lot of money on items that I later found out turned out to be counterfeit/forgeries. I had not done my research/due diligence and I had suffered from a severe case of FOMO!!
Flawless segue into this week’s articles. All of which could be summarized by saying “financial literacy is the unfair advantage“….. my adopted son Anthony Williams first told me that.
Too many of us today….due to boredom brought on by the pandemic….get caught up in FOMO and panic/frenzied buying. Calculated risks turn into reckless speculation when greed takes over. Just ask Zillow.
Too many service industry and “starter job“ workers believe that they deserve to shortcut the system due to having pandemic/government subsidies given to them that were higher than what they were making at their jobs. They now want to hold those industries hostage not understanding or not caring about the fact that labor is the most expensive part of any industry. Affordable food and housing cannot be obtained with expensive labor.
The combination of entitlement and frenzied FOMO has caused the average person to be priced out of the very community that they have been living in. Baby Boomers…those who hold the greatest concentration of wealth the world has ever known can no longer afford to downsize to a smaller home. They must keep their larger paid for home off the market and away from those of the younger generation who want to buy it.
Who would want to buy a new home in the first place if building materials are in short supply so shortcuts have to be taken…. and built by untrained, unskilled laborers? Imagine the class action lawsuits that will be happening 10 years from now!!
What is truly sad is that all of this financial ignorance is costing us the American Dream. What a financially educated person would see as the normal ebb and flow of the financial cycle… the ignorant see as the end of the world and so “we must get while we still can“. It is an addiction that feeds upon itself and the addict needs more and more in order to get back to a perceived “reality”.
My Fellow Compassionate Capitalists…..NOW is the time to educate ourselves as well as our family and friends in financial literacy. NOW is the time to understand our economic roles when it comes to participating in the economy and providing a product or service at a reasonable cost and profit. NOW is the time to understand that WE ARE the ones who are in control of our own lives and destiny. Only WE have the ability in our present circumstance to have a say in the construction of our future.
Only WE can determine that NOW it is more important than ever to believe in our ability to “NEVER awake from the American Dream.”
