Life is expensive and it seems it’s about to become even more so.  Like most people I did not grow up with personal financial education. I think it’s one of the many ways the public school system fails people in America.  Most adults lack personal financial knowledge.  If you weren’t taught it at home, you most likely didn’t learn it in school. I grew up in poverty, and was taught one thing about money, how to survive on very little of it.  This can be a helpful lesson, but the missing part is how to acquire and sustain more of it.

We live in the greatest informational time in history, and the thing about having an overwhelming wealth of knowledge at our fingertips is, if you want to learn about personal finance, it is available, and for free.  Now, there are lots of paid information that exists out there too but remember there is also lot of free information.  I know it can at times be hard to tell what is beneficial versus what is absolutely useless but sometimes a little common sense can go a long way in distinguishing between the two. 

Rule of thumb, get rich quick is a fallacy.  And as the old saying goes, “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” and it will not be the answer for your financial issues.  Learning about personal finance can be simple, the rules of personal finance haven’t really changed that much over the years.  We think it has because there seems like there is so much money out there now a days and we all are just trying to figure out how to get a piece of it.  Small steps: you must earn a living, of those earnings, live on less than you make, save, and invest the rest. Like all major quandaries in life, consistency is the key. It’s not flashy, it’s not some grand secret. It’s the fundamentals of personal finance. Some people are ok with leveraging debt to invest, some people simply use what they earn. These days however, it’s just about surviving for a lot of people.  

Life has consistently gotten more expensive over the years. Ideally, the older you get, the more your earning potential increases but when the cost of living exceeds what you can earn, how does anyone survive?  I think times will get harder before it gets better but I also know that people are creative and resilient when they need to be, building networks of other like-minded individuals, sharing households & expenses. Getting side gigs, cutting out the unnecessary. If I have to temporary survive on very little, I can, but life shouldn’t be about just enduring when you work hard every day to try to build a more fulfilling existence for yourself and your family.

Economies rise and fall; people don’t take time to look at the past to be reminded of this fact. Although we are all feeling the strain right now, I am optimistic that change will come, and I continue to search and absorb financial education to be able to navigate the money game. Until the days that the likes of Starbucks or Amazon goes out of business or lose profits because no one is shopping there, I think we will survive for now.