Saving money is easy.
However, most of us live in a consumer-driven world that does everything possible to make saving money as hard as possible.
Money is a means of converting future value to something useful or desired today. This works from your employer who trades their money for your labor today to you to take your money to trade for lunch today. Eating is a good and important thing. But sometimes you trade for less important things.
When we’re surrounded by an endless variety of consumer goods and services, all carefully created for their specific ability to entice you to trade your money, it’s easy to see why many want to trade all their money for stuff today. Highly skilled marketers craft clever messages to manipulate your wants and advertisers do their best to pound that message into you at the lowest cost.
Still, while it’s easy to point the fault for the lack of savings on the lack of will or discipline, most people actually have insufficient stuff, whether in reality or from their psychological perception. Without solid training and reinforcement of good savings habits, most people keep trading their money for ever more stuff.
Then there’s the reality that rich people work tirelessly to ensure those at the bottom 90% save as little as possible to create a captive labor force. By keeping incomes low and encouraging comforting spending, there’s no savings to compete with the rich to acquire income producing assets. The rich have curated misdirections in schools that learning outdated skills of the past century extremely well will be enough. Meanwhile, they send their kids to get all the other skills.
For immigrants who come as adults into the consumer world, they’ve already developed strong savings habits over a lifetime. They’re able to reject enticements to spend and have been taught to focus themselves on acquiring assets. In addition, many immigrants live on the margin, just a few bits of bad luck from living on the streets with no social safety net.
Hence, to develop good savings habits, spend time with some first generation immigrants. Even if only some of those savings skills rub off, that’ll make a huge difference over decades. With some investment skills, those savings can compound into substantial and life-changing sums, the kind of money that enable immigrants to catch up with established residents who have decades of head start.
