Staying broke is a mindset, and being broke can become an addiction. You become accustomed to not having substantial finances because that is how your mom, dad, sister, or best friend lived. So, you normalize it, keep living life, and just say, ‘I am getting by.’ This is not by accident; you consciously or unconsciously put yourself in an environment that reinforces that it is an okay way to live. Before you know it, it becomes a part of you and becomes an addiction.
The same process applies to why we do not feel the need to make a financial plan for our lives; nobody taught us better. We are so comfortable living our lives without a plan because we are too scared to think of the future. There is no plan in place for if we get diagnosed with a chronic, critical, or terminal illness, no plan in place if we lose our jobs and are unfit to work. We just keep getting by. Opportunities come our way, but we brush over them and keep making excuses for them. The reality is that we have become addicted to the poverty mindset.
We are quick to call people greedy—those who have made the decision to change their lives and make things work for them. We call them greedy because they are living their best lives, because they contributed the minimum to your GoFundMe, because they sent a box of diapers to your baby shower, because they brought flowers to the funeral of your loved one. But those we call greedy are not greedy; they simply took the extraordinary step to lift themselves out of their own financial situation.
I challenge you to change your financial situation today. If you have been in that position of going about your daily life, just living by, affording to do the bare minimum of paying your bills and no thought of the legacy you plan to leave for your next generation, take a minute to think to yourself, ‘Do I deserve to be in this situation?’ If the answer is no, then you should change your mindset to not focus on wanting more as being greedy but on the perspective of being deserving. I believe everyone is deserving of the lifestyle they aspire to have.
I do not know about you, but we have one life to live. I want to live this one life in a way that I have enough financial resources. And this is only made possible by having the right plan in place, by protecting my hard-earned income. Every time I spend a dollar, I want to be sure that the dollar is being replaced and more. If I ever get unfit to work, I want to rest easy knowing my income will be replaced. So that my children in the future will never have to say, ‘I cannot afford,’ or I will never have to tell them, ‘We cannot afford.’ And this right here is how wealth is created. Poverty is a mindset more than it is an account balance.”
