I Care About My Money, Do You?

This is a guest post from Ashley over at Learn Stock Market Basics. If you are interested in learning more about the stock market stop by and see what they have to offer. They are focused on helping you find the best investments for your situation.

I like money. That’s no secret. I spend all day every day thinking about money, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I think, live, breathe, write, talk, eat money. And I live the principles I write about here.

I return things if they don’t meet my expectations. I adhere to a fairly strict budget. I spend my money consciously and if an opportunity comes up to spend money that doesn’t fit into my goals I decline.

Sometimes I get some slack for this. “All you care about is money.” I’ve heard it. Usually it’s because I’ve refused to give someone money. I said “No.” to someone and they are mad about it. They wanted to take advantage of me and I turned them away.

The words “It’s not in my budget.” make some people very mad. Especially if they know you could but don’t want to. I’m not saying I can’t do something because I can’t afford it. I’m saying that I’m not choosing to spend money on whatever activity or project they have. Not because I can’t afford it, but because I don’t want to.

It’s because all I care about is money.

Oh wait, that’s not true at all. I care about money because I care about life. You trade your life for money. If you are lucky you are making money doing something that you love, which even then you are still trading your time and effort to make money. Most of us however are literally trading our hours for dollars. Think about how precious our hours are.

That’s our life. Our real actual life. So to care about money is to care about life. When return something that doesn’t work, or refuse to buy candy for a school fundraiser. It’s because that money represents my husband’s life. He had to leave us and go to a job that’s not his passion, take abuse, work hard, get dirty, get stressed out so that we could have money. I’m not just going to hand it out like I don’t care. I’m not just going to shrug my shoulders and be too embarrassed to say “No”.

Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about people who think that if you want to keep your money that you are evil. I’ve noticed that they themselves are usually willing to bend, or flat-out break, ethical rules for money.

When someone implies that rich people are evil I often wonder what they themselves are willing to do for money. Usually it doesn’t take me long to see that they are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and game a system for a few extra dollars. Maybe they feel they have to lie to make money. Therefore if someone has a lot of money then they must have lied a lot.

I mean, that makes perfect sense. If stealing was the ONLY way to get money then someone who was rich must have done a lot of stealing.

Thankfully, that’s not the case. There are lots of very ethical ways to make money. I will stick with those, thank you very much.

My thoughts: This guest post carry the same idea I expressed last week about steps towards pursuit of being rich. Like Ashley, I do take extreme care of my money and I know beside family and very few close friends this is the only resource that would take care of my life.

What do you think readers?

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