How to Stay Poor

Imagine you came into a pile of money. Maybe you won the lottery, or perhaps you inherited some funds from a relative who passed on and left you a piece of their estate.

If you treat that money in a certain way, spending it as you need to and living off it, here’s a story to consider.

Imagine you’re on a boat sailing across the ocean. You rely on the wind to get you where you want to go, but even the most clever breeze can’t help you because your path is ambiguous and inconsistent. Your boat is made of that money. Every time you spend, you deplete a portion of your ship. At first, you lower, roll up, and discard sails one at a time. When your boat stops moving, you start ripping up deck boards to use as paddles. But that just keeps you going around in circles, doing the same thing over and over, and dropping them in the water.

The sea is the market. It is immense. It will gladly accept your contributions and incorporate all raw materials back into itself.

Soon, the deck is completely gone, and you begin removing boards from the hull! It doesn’t make much sense, but you go on, taking care to remove smaller and smaller pieces as you dismantle your ship. You can stay afloat if the sea is calm and there are no storms or strong winds. What if something unexpected happens?

With each passing day, more boards are taken out and lost in the open water, making your boat smaller, less stable, and more vulnerable. Your level of anxiety is increasing. You know eventually it will give way under your weight and tip over. You know you’ll need to swim or tread water to keep yourself from drowning. As uncomfortable as it may be, you’ve been there before. It is very familiar. You despise it, but you understand it well.

Hopefully, other sailors will come by to lend a hand, but they are more experienced than you and won’t part with components of their own ships, and having you on board would be a strain on their resources; they have their own responsibilities to tend to. They might offer to tow you somewhere for a bit. But that weighs on you because they are on their own journey and will eventually need to continue, and you have no way to pay them back, though they may not ask for anything in return.

We always have a choice. We can choose differently, breaking patterns and gradually developing new habits.

You can plan ahead. You can educate and inform yourself by reflecting, meditating, considering, gaining experience, and conducting research and technical analysis to help you discover your own path and purpose. Maps and charts can help you plan a strategy or a route to a specific destination.

You may choose to sail to another land or port where you can dock your boat, repair or improve it, and spend some time on solid ground to get your bearings. While you’re there, you could leverage and profit from the boat by lending or renting it out. A boat moored near the shore is useless, and it may even lose value while also incurring fees to keep it there.

The point is that your money is an asset if you value it, understand it, and treat it accordingly. You can put it at risk by spending it all for short-term gains, for long-deferred gratifications, or you can use it wisely to achieve greater stability and long-term freedom.

[A] lady … was in my last group and she was stuck in many ways, including financially. This isn’t a surprise, as our society teaches people to struggle financially. Keeping citizens in financial lack is a key design of our culture’s control mechanisms. Financially weak folks are easier to rule, control, dominate, govern, lie to and manipulate. The same can be said for physically weak people, mentally weak people, emotionally weak people and intellectually weak people. This is why this entire system we live within focuses on weakening the population at every turn.

— Jason Christoff

As we all know, the difference between rich and poor is simply a mindset. There are many forms of poverty; it is not just about money, but also about making decisions based on fear, incomplete information, scarcity, and lack.