Grew up basically looking at this book my entire life with my father, on the positive side. Never really knew how good my father did. He always wore Walmart Henley's, Wrangler jeans, and Topsiders he got on sale or Walmart work boots. Always was rough about shelling out cash to us as kids. Never heard him and my mother talk about debt. We had a boat and did 90% of the work on it ourselves. Same with the house.
He put the money where it mattered: Our education and upbringing. I still worked two jobs from the time I was 19 until about 24-25 but we knew the value of hard work.
My father was never a great teacher, still isn't. He did give me a few good nuggets and one of them was: "Don't get yourself in debt." We have a mortgage, car lease, and that's about it. CC's are paid in full the end of every month. Debt is the enemy of the wealth.
Now there are exceptions. Working in wealth management there is debt arbitrage, debt strategies, etc. All on the business side. However, unless you're operating in a higher-league, most of it doesn't make sense.
Borrowing money or wasting money on lifestyle is one of the top problems I see in today's world. It's all social media driven. People see the families with the nice house, nice car, etc. They think it's paradise and they need to get there. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they are house poor, have a $1,000 in the bank, and have a ton of unsecured debt.
The issue, in my life and my line of work, is I'm surrounded by folks who are in a whole other echelon. Triple digit millions net-worth. For them, a splurge item might be a $250,000 car. Very tough to not fall into the comparison game.
I basically live my life the same as my father. I wear Marshall's clothes, Levi's, drive a Mazda Cx50 (my wife drive's a Tahoe, to be fair), etc. The stuff that matters to me is my family, our health, and having a safety net-fund for emergencies.
