Your Personal Golden Mean Will Bring You Ever Closer to Financial Independence
How to Achieve Financial Freedom by Asking Yourself One Question
… and It Isn’t “Do I buy or not?”
As I shared in “Embrace Your Humanness — A Practical Guide to Having More,” I would have been better off had someone shared with me this hard-won piece of financial wisdom when I was 30.
It was November ’92, and I was looking at the first car I’d ever buy in the US, a 3-year-old 3.8-liter Ford Taurus LX. Buying it took most of my cash on hand, plus $6000 borrowed at 10.4% annual interest rate! The payments were almost 10% of my after-tax salary!
I could have, heck, I should have found a car that cost half as much, even if it meant buying a 5- or 6-year-old midsize. But I was hooked, and the used-car salesman reeled me in.
As a Society, We Have a Financial Problem…
As Americans, we have a problem. A big one. It shows up in our low saving rate (down by almost half relative to what it was in the 60s, 70s, and much of the 80s), in our out-of-control debt (average consumer debt is ~55% of the median US household income, based on data from , , and ), and in the fact that 60% of us would be unable to come…
