Money Money Money

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

                                                                -Woody Allen

You'd be hard pressed to find a person who said that what they wanted in the future is to have less money. Heck, if you know someone like that, send them my way and I'll make sure that they don't need to worry about having too much money ever again.

Joking aside, while everyone wants to have more money, how many people do you know who have spent time thinking about why they want the money and what they want to do with it? It's easy to imagine living the high life, having a ton of money and wasting it on all sorts of stuff like fast cars and lots of bling bling.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is necessarily anything wrong with those things but what I mean is if you only want money for the sole purpose of showing off how much money you have, perhaps you should speak to someone about improving your self-esteem.

From about the age of thirteen, I've always wanted to be rich and to have a ton of money. At that age, both those concepts meant the same thing but as I grew older and spent more time learning about money, I realised that there is a difference between having money and being rich.

I believe that being rich is more about a mental state where you are attuned to the abundance that is there in the universe, where you live your life in a positive way, simply expecting the best. On the other hand, it is possible to have a ton of money and still feel that you don't have enough and that you are going to lose it all. Even if we don't know these people personally, we all know the anecdotes of the poor person who is so happy that they don't feel their life could get any better and the rich person who feels inadequate.

I'll get into the details of being rich in another post but I just wanted to talk about how I view what money actually is. I believe that money is nothing more than an idea, a concept if you will, that we have given a certain amount of value. It's not exactly ground-breaking stuff.

Money gives you options but it's not exactly clear why or how that is true. I remember the example given in Rich Dad, Poor Dad about how with different amounts of money you would be able to make a long distance trip in different ways. The concept that was suggested in the book was that money was a way of representing time in a physical manner. And that kind of makes sense.

You go to work and you are exchanging your time for money. With that money, you then have the option of buying things that you didn't have the time to spend making yourself. You exchange time with other people and money is how you keep track.

So when you have a lot of money, what that means is you now have a lot of time saved up that you can use for whatever purpose you want. Unless you are using the money to create a real difference in the world, all you are doing is wasting time. You might as well just be a poor daydreamer. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that if you have money and you're not changing the world for anyone other than yourself, you're nothing but a spoilt kid, more focused on being selfish and accumulating toys than anything else.

I've always wanted to have money but I've gone from wanting a big garage with a lot of fast cars to wanting to make a difference in the world, leaving behind a legacy as it were. I know that there is a certain amount of money that I will need in order to make sure that I can take care of myself and those that I love but beyond that, the money that I have will be spent making the world a better place. Spending money on things that improve the quality of life for all would be far more satisfying than owning a fancy car or taking a cool trip somewhere.

And for those of you who are old enough to remember it, here is that ABBA song.

- Life is a game and money is just one way of keeping score.