becoming rich while waiting for the denouemente

aleks posted up a link to Digital Luddite's One-Step Guide to Becoming Rich over at mohican's place that is worth reading. Maybe you will be curious to take the link trip. It's not RE related, but the writing is a good diversion.

This whole RE/financial thing is getting wearying. It's like waiting for the denouemente in the Russian version of War and Peace.

Here is the One-Step Guide to Becoming Rich (redacted), and it is not flipping real estate.

Becoming rich is not complicated. Calculating the launch vector to send a rocket to Pluto is complicated, involving all sorts of higher level math (ie grade 10 and above). Becoming rich involves no math more complicated than addition and subtraction.

The reason most people don't do it is that it's difficult...

The One-Step Guide to Becoming Rich is this: Spend less than you earn. The more you earn and the less you spend, the richer you become.

It sounds like common sense. It should be common sense. And yet, as sense goes it's anything but common. The...collective US citizenry...are in fact following the One-Step Guide to Becoming Poor.

Probably because if you are like most people,... you want to appear rich. You want...to make your neighbours jealous. You don't even know how to calculate your net worth, or what it means when the number is negative.

And ironically, it's the desire to appear rich that prevents people from becoming rich. Trying to impress your neighbours is the very first thing on the list of 10 Reasons You Aren't Rich.

Another good one is #6: You Try to Make a Quick Buck. Gambling is more popular now than ever...

CONdo flipping is gambling

Sure, you can probably do basic addition with a calculator, and some of you may remember what a ratio is, but on a fundamental level you don't understand how numbers work....

...Today's hip internet slacker doesn't want to "save," you want to "invest" and buy "stocks" and "currency hedged mutual funds whose asset mix and investment strategy you don't understand."

...If you spend less than you earn, you can't help becoming rich. Maybe you would become richer faster if you made better investment decisions, but there's a corollary for that too: You are not Warren Buffett.

Every month that you follow the One-Step Guide, you will be richer than the month before. It's a virtually foolproof system.

The only flaw is... Once you spend the money, you're not rich anymore. Like the One-Step Guide itself, it's pretty much common sense, but it's a bit of a catch-22.

In a future rantenspiel I'll outline the Two-Step Guide to Becoming Slightly Less Rich But Still Getting to Go Out Occasionally and Buy New Versions of Guitar Hero.

It's not quite as catchy.

Couldn'a said it better myself.

From the same site -

Of course, what's really happening is that journalists are acting more like bloggers.

Which was pretty much inevitable, if you think about it. The internet at large is always at least five years behind the porn industry, and what is a blog except a low budget, grainy, amateur hand-held version of real journalism?

I like that! Grainy and hand-held is us.