The Problem With Living Below Your Means
Spending less leads to getting less
“I haven’t received your rent”. I was about to go to the grocery store when my landlord walked up to me on my way to my bike. We had been renting this place with my girlfriend for over 4 years and had never paid one single rent late, and I even made sure to pay 1 day in advance every month. Something was amiss here. “Oh no, that’s odd, probably a mess up from my bank, I’m really sorry about that”, I replied. I had an idea of what may have happened.
Every 6 months I had to manually set the recurring payments for security reasons, and for some reason this time, the changes hadn’t gone through and the money was still sitting in my account.
“I think I know what happened, but did you double-check today though?” I inquired. “I’m sure,” she said. Then, she proceeded to open up her banking app and showed me her account in full. I found the situation slightly awkward, but I still took a quick look at her screen, just to not leave her hanging. I didn’t even see where the rent should have shown on the screen. Instead, a much more prominent thing stuck out and left me bewildered: my landlord, who lived in a $800,000 house we were renting the basement of, was a manager in pharma and was just back from vacation in Greece, had less money in her checking account than I did. Way…
