Everyday business people and corporations are spending money trying to figure out how you make decisions so that with that understanding they can influence and persuade you to buy their products. There are all kinds of salesmen for all kinds of products and services, these are highly trained people whose primary goal is to relieve you of your hard earned cash; believe it or not.
┬áNo wonder our houses and offices are full with things that we bought even though we don’t need them and will quite possibly never ever need. Unless you are self trained frugal consumer chances are that you will not find consumer education programs that teach you how to make informed purchasing decisions. Most of the time you are left on your own to navigate the dangerous waters of life commerce that are infested by sharks we call salesmen.
┬áI have a multi millionaire friend who is never the first to pay for anything. If it happens that he has to pay he will always offer to pay on condition that we split the bill. It seems my millionaire friend’s mission is to not spend more money than it is necessary or to pay where others can pay for him. I also have other friends who are not millionaires but who always jump at taking care of the bill with their credit cards. To the contrary my multi-millionaire friend always carries cash. My multi-millionaire drives a car that’s five years old and only bought it after he felt that his eleven year old primary car was giving him trouble.
 On the other hand my other friends drive very lovely cars including and in fact if you were to evaluate them on face value you would be tempted to think that my thousandnaire friends actually have more money or have higher net worth than my millionaire friend. I call them thousandaires because beneath the exterior of success they want to project they are merely a couple of paychecks away from bankruptcy.
┬áI think sometimes in life we get confused about stuff and we think that having more stuff equates to wealth. So because we are uneducated consumers in a world that is run by salesmen of all kinds we end up buying stuff that we don’t need because we are desperate to appear to be doing better than we actually are. Image we are told is everything, so we leverage credit to acquire all these liabilities that we call assets but are non-performing or depreciating assets if at all they are assets.
 As people move up the socio economic pyramid they acquire expensive and sophisticated taste, soon their expenses rise to accommodate their new income bracket. Sooner or later they will not have enough left over for saving or investing because salesmen have found someone to finance their profits.
I am saying this not to ridicule my thousandnaire friends or glorify my millionaire friend but rather to give you the opportunity to evaluate your own spending habits. Is how you spend your hard earned money determined by the salesmen you will meet today or by a plan that you live by. Of course salesmen are not necessarily bad people, they are nice people who simply have an agenda for maximizing their profits and if you are not careful you will be financing their next profits.
It is not unusual for people to walk into a store and then ask the price of the merchandise before they examine its quality. Often if its price is low people are not interested because they assume that is of low quality and if its priced high they assume that the merchandise is of a higher quality. So smart salesmen price their goods higher than average not only so that they can get more profit per item but also so that they prey on price worshippers who evaluate quality only on the basis of price.
┬áIt is reasonable to conclude that the way life is configured today we have been programmed to chase money and that for most people the chief aim to which they dedicate most of their waking hours is to acquire money. However, that being the case what I find interesting is that as much as people dedicate countless hours to chasing and earning money. It is only negligible amount of people who teach themselves how to invest or spend their hard earned money wisely. Most people it seems in this not only to make money but to spend it as soon as they have made it. So the question then becomes are you one of those people who make money to spend it? Money can earn you freedom to stop working and slaving away for the rest of your days but you have to respect it by making sure that once you have it, it works as hard for you as you’ve worked hard for it.┬á
