Never Become Middle Class: The Neighbor

In a recent post, I stated that all you have to do to become rich in this country is to spend less than you make.

My neighbor came over and knocked angrily on my door last night. "I read yer damn blog."

(A quick note: My neighbor may come across as a charicature of a redneck. That's not my prejudice; he is a charicature of himeslf.)

"How am I gonna spend less than I make? I work my ass off and I still don't make enough to git by on."

I looked at my neighbor. He was wearing $150 nikes. "You work at a grocery store, stocking shelves. You spend half your day slowly opening boxes, and the other half smoking dope behind the trash can." My neighbor, I estimate, spends about $300 per month on illicit drugs.

My neighbor looked at me as though he was planning to set down the $1.95 bottle of Pepsi he was drinking (the fourth one of the day) and punch me. I said, "Let's go back to your place and talk about it.

We walked past his new truck, parked on the curb. He'd got a fancy new tint job on the windows recently.

Back in his living room I admired his new $1,500 dollar flatscreen HD television. "Nice," I said.

"I got extended cable," he replied. ($120 per month) You orta come over and watch movies with me and ma wife sometime." He had a Blueray player ($299) and a shelf full of disks. He's replacing his DVDs with the new disk format as soon as they become available.

His wife and son were sitting on the couch eating Papa John's pizza. ($23.87 + delivery tip)

Between the two of them they make about $35,000 per year. They are up to their eyeballs in debt because they can't afford daycare after their $400 a month rent bill and their $150 a month utilities bill. Thank goodness they don't have a phone bill; they each have a Blackberry, which only cost $219 each (after signing a 2-year agreement to pay about $115 per month for the phone and internet service.)

Perhaps I was wrong. These people have no chance of ever becoming rich. I apologized and helped myself to pizza.

Never Become Middle Class

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of my rules for success was "Never become middle class." I got a lot of email about that, asking me to explain. Here goes:

There are two classes in the U.S.A.

1) Rich People

2) Poor People

The genius of this country is that in order to change class, all you have to do is change the amount of money you have.

There is a third, imaginary class of people called "The Middle Class." This group is composed of people who would become rich if they would stop pretending to be rich.

Imagine this scenario:

You and your spouse live in a trailer/apartment. Between the two of you, you are making about $35,000 a year. Life is okay. You have an ugly used car that runs, and you have never missed a meal.

One day, one of you gets a promotion at work. Suddenly, you are making $55,000 a year. You immediately run out and "buy" two new cars and put a down payment on a house.

A year later, you are $200,000 in debt. You will never be able to pay off your debt, because it constantly generates more of itself. you buy everything with credit cards, which increases your debt. You life in a nice house and drive a nice car, but life just sucks. You are constantly worried that the economy will turn sour, that you will lose your job and suddenly find yourself back in the trailer with no car and a mountain of debt.

Congratulations. You are Middle Class.


Consider the alternative:

...One day, one of you gets a promotion at work. Suddenly, you are making $55,000 a year. You put it in the bank. Six years later, you will have enough money to buy a nice house and a slightly nicer car. If the economy goes sour, you could live on your savings. You are happy. By most peoples' standards, you are rich.

This is what I meant by "Never become middle class." In other words, always live below your means.

Tattoo Removal and Enforced Baldness: Misadventures in Symbolism

A friend of mine recently had a tattoo removed. It left a massive scar on the back of her neck that basically still advertises the band Nine Inch Nails. Who knew, when she got it fifteen years ago, that one day she might not quite be as into Nine Inch Nails?

I have received so much joy from making fun of her about this, but then I got to thinking...

[FLASHBACK]

When I was nineteen, I started shaving my head. To me, this was a symbol of my own spiritual and social code. I grew up watching a lot of the Kung Fu television series (R.I.P. David Carradine, and I hope you paid the underage prostitute first), and I wanted everyone to know that I was different.
After about a year of shaving my head, I decided that I would be doing it for the rest of my life, and it was a lot of shaving, so I came up with an idea: Permanent hair removal.
Before we continue, let me describe an epilator to you.
An epilator is a device that uses a giant vibrating spring to rip the hairs out of your legs, etc. Another feature of the expensive ones is that they electrocute the hair follicles right before ripping the hairs from the follicles. Many women regularly go through this mind-bogglingly painful experience to remove unsightly leg and bikini line (!) hairs.
Continuing on...
I ordered one of these neat little devices from a magazine and let my hair grow out to a stubble. One day, I sauntered into my bathroom, plugged the epilator in, applied the epilator to my scalp, and proceeded to scream like a little girl.
Something you might not know about head hair is that it is much more firmly rooted than, say, leg hair. The result was that it failed to pull out my head hair, and simply started to try and rip open my scalp while repeatedly electrocuting me. The scene I viewed of myself in the bathroom mirror looked rather like a Mr. Bean sketch, with me desperately trying anything I could think of to remove the device, such as bracing myself on the sink with my foot even though that provided no leverage. It was a couple of minutes before it occurred to me to unplug the device.

I continued to shave my head for another eleven years. Now I have a head of hair that elicits Fabio or Jesus jokes on a regular basis. If my little plan had worked, I would never again have been able to grow this sexy head of hair.

My blog is supposed to be about unorthodox self improvement, so I try to have a point to each blog entry. I completely made up the part about the friend with the tattoo so i could tell you about my epilation incident and pretend that the moral is something about not judging others. The End.

Last Year I Went Crazy

So I'm looking back on the last year, and I have decided that I went crazy.
A year ago, I hand no debt, no bank accounts, a completely blank credit history, one $200 bill per month, and a few thousand dollars saved up. I was fulfilled and happy in my life.
Since then, I have developed a need for three (3) bank accounts, a car payment, and six different bills each month. In other words, I will require $700 a month for the foreseeable future just to keep up.
To top it off, I got a corporate job. I was wildly successful in my work, and so I was fired. I never got my last paycheck. Now I am $16,000 in debt. I'm miserable and stuck in a crappy town that I can't afford to leave.
I broke almost every rule I have for success:

1. Never work for someone else
2. Never become middle class
3. Never buy something if you cannot afford it
4. Never rely on a corporation for anything

So as far as I'm concerned, I went crazy.
But do you want to know the really crazy part?
Most people do this stuff all the time!