How Can We Become Wealthier?
I’m pretty sure more people are interested in the How than the Why, so let’s get it out of the way. By no means is this sound investment advice, but I believe the future (arguably a few years back really) lies in crypto (stable coin) lending / staking. An overly-simplified outlook would be like this: The market will crash like always, people will be upset and you’ll start accumulating BTC, ETH, BNB and stable coins while lending or staking it to collect interest. The market will go back up again. Two things will happen: (1) I’m wrong and the market doesn’t bounce back. (2) You’ll blame yourself for not buying.
Crypto is a speculative space and the only advice that you’ll need to know is that you gotta trust no one, except yourself to do the research.
In order to become wealthier, we’ll need to increase the gap between earning and spending. We’ll then place the GAP amount in investments to earn a higher rate of return. To earn more, we need to build up deep competencies in areas where people are willing to pay for, what we hopefully enjoy doing for most parts of our day and eventually creating products and service out of it so that we get paid for the value we deliver rather than the fixed amount of hours we put in. To spend wisely, we strive to buy things that cost more, but last for a long time which we use very often. As the GAP amount increases, our wealth machine gradually builds up overtime and we aim for a cash flow that is able to pay for all or parts of our expenses.
With the absent of luck or being born into an affluent status, this is the most generic yet realistic way we’ll become wealthier.
By the time most of us understand this concept intellectually and actually try to put into practice, we tend to face the recurring theme of learning. Learning is tough, because time is limited, or at least it seems so. Cognitively, it is also difficult to pick up new things. I’m sure we all have money now, but most of us struggle to manage it. How can we best optimize it? What is the wealth machine we’re looking at? What should we avoid? Specifically, we lack conviction in our investments. We lack the reason of wanting to be wealthier.
We know money alleviates anxiety and the pursuit of wealth is meant to be the solution to address happiness, however what happens if earning money is the reason for us not having enough time for the things we really wanted to do?
More often than we like it, we’re stuck between the zone of material-spending and experience-spending. Material-spending is more practical due to the nature of the item lasting longer than the experience. It has a direct relation to utility. However, I’d like to think that most of us prefer experience-spending. Experiential purchases bring more joy, especially when it is shared with a special someone. Joy is then derived from the stage of anticipation all the way to it being transformed into nostalgic memories. The complicated part is that the entry card for most experiences is a material purchase. I sincerely believe we all know how and why we want to become wealthier as a human-being, but in the midst of it, we’ve lost direction as to how and why we want to become richer as a person. Once you find out and know for a clear fact why you need that sum of money for, the trajectory of your life will change.
