Million dollar mistake #3
Having bad habits could be a serious barrier on your way to financial freedom (becoming a millionaire). Let’s have one thing clear before we proceed with this article. I am not against smoking, drinking or whatever “bad habits” is used in your understanding. The only thing that interest me, and you, coz you’re still reading this article – is the financial point of view.
Now, when we all understand the topic and its boundaries, let me continue.
Habits such as smoking, heavy drinking, gambling etc. Again, we are not talking about potential health problems or mental distress, psychological, social and whatsoever else. This time we are concentrating strictly on the financial side of the story. Let’s start with simple mathematics and count how many cigarettes you smoke per day (if you’re a non smoker – use the same technique to compare and analyze your expenses and discover “your bad habits” – meaning – useless expenses, and their patterns). What is the cost of one pack? How many packs do you smoke per year? – multiply by ten years, add possible interest rate or average percentage that could be generated from possible investments and here you are – you just wasted another million. Same applies to drinking and gambling. As I mentioned previously – “bad habits” are not necessarily bad habits the way they are understood by the society. Financial “bad habits” could also be your behavioral patterns that you had never thought off. For example – each year you subscribe to a newspaper that you don’t reed. Another example – when you shop, you buy useless stuff that you never use… Now that has a tendency to happen more often with more of us. Or another example – when you go to a grocery store – you actually buy so much more, that after a week, you have to clean your fridge – because most of the food in it is out of date, and you haven’t even touched it. No lets admit – these kinds of things tend to happen. And when thought about it – they have the tendency to reoccur. So this is what I call the “bad financial habits”. Simple mathematics again – just calculate how much of food you waste each week, calculate 10 week’s averages, multiply and see the result. Ok, enough about it, if you’re still reading, you probably understood the situation.
Now let’s face the other side of the story. Let’s get back to smoking and calculate the actual cost of the purchased cigarette pack… not today, but five, ten years from now and consider the expenses needed to restore your health. Health, mental and moral issues are of no interest to most of us as today. Nevertheless, let’s stay within the “financial” boundaries of the topic. If you’re a smoker, here comes additional 3% because of the higher cancer probability. And so on, and so on… I can go on with another 100 pages.
Conclusion: Financially bad habits are on the dark side, they are bad, they are total expense, no income, no use – end of story…
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