Day 835 of 1000
Betty Blonde #17 – 08/08/2008
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We are big fans of Dave Ramsey. He put a list up on his website that I like very much. Virtually every item on the list is a worthy habit to engender. The only thing I do not like about it is that it is characterized as a list of the differences between rich people and poor people. I am sure the statistics for the calculations were made with some arbitrary definition of rich and poor. That is fine, and I have a good level of confidence that they are true. My problem with it is that the rich-poor distinction makes the list way less interesting.
I think of poor people who would be characterized as rich if they were measured against the items on the list. Those people are WAY more interesting than the people who are rich that have established those habits. Examples of such people might include Mother Teresa and other Christian ministers who have left everything to help people they had never previously met. It might also include academics, authors, and artists who, for the love of knowledge, literature, and art, have given up more lucrative careers to follow their passions.
There are other examples, but my sense is that engendering such habits for the purpose of getting rich is not so worthy. The nobility of a goal has little or nothing to do with how much money one earns in doing it. I suppose it could be argued that riches will come if one establishes these habits, but it is a secondary artifact, not a noble goal in an of itself. I do not want this to be misconstrued to suggest, one should not pay their own way. People need to be financially responsible for themselves. Nevertheless, riches will get no one into heaven. The habits list stands alone, as a noble goal, whether or not they lead to riches or to something else, a lot more noble.