Debt is Slavery, Part 2: Is money really not that important to you?

Michael Mihalik's Debt is Slavery is a short book that has a ton of great insights packed into its 123 pages.

The second post in this series deals with the importance of money in our lives. This is one of several observations that Mihalik makes in his book that makes so much sense, but goes against what a lot of people say every day:

“Money really just isn't that important to me.”

Oh, really?

How come so many of us go to jobs we don't really like for “the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives?” Because we all like torturing ourselves?

No, it's because we have cable bills, cell phone bills, water bills, gas bills, high-speed-internet bills, car loans, credit card balances, home equity loans, and mortgages that need to be paid, lest really bad things happen. Money is indeed very important to most of us because we have these necessities and luxuries that have payments. If we already had the money, we wouldn't need to work! I suspect a lot of us wouldn't be going to the jobs we go to now if we didn't have to earn the money. I sure wouldn't. I'd be spending time with my family and playing piano and trumpet — not driving an hour a day to try to code on a woefully outdated computer on a horrible network and listening to my two-year-old daughter grow up over the phone in my cubicle.

But I like the house we live in. I like that my wife at least gets to stay home with our daughter. I like the amount we contribute to our church. I like that we can afford foods that my daughter isn't allergic to. I like all of these things that money can buy. So I go to work. Getting that paycheck is important to me.

So yeah: Money is pretty darn important to most of us. And it gets even more important if there's a lot of consumer debt in the picture. It's not just the stuff that's being paid for — it's also interest on the stuff. It's grim enough not having a lot of debt payments.

One of Mihalik's motivations in Debt is Slavery is to get people to change the way people think about money, because that's when change can occur. Recognizing that money really is important is one big step to changing one's personal finances for the better, and he's absolutely right about that.

2 thoughts on “Debt is Slavery, Part 2: Is money really not that important to you?”

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "not that important". If you had enough money to pay all your bills out of passive income, would you still go to work every day at a job you didn't like, just to earn MORE money? If not, then it could well be fair to say that money isn't _that_ important to you….rather, it's merely a means to an end, and a necessary commodity of which you haven't yet accumulated a fully self-reproducing supply.

What's _really that_ important to me? Love. Family. Time. Friends. A good relationship with God and with most of the people I know. All the things of which it would be a misnomer to even attempt to ask whether one had "enough". Whereas with money, one can plot the precise point on a graph where expending continuing effort to accumulate more of it ceases to make sense unless one is receiving some other secondary compensation for that effort. (For example, if you happen to really enjoy your job, you certainly don't need to quit just because you don't need the money anymore. But no matter how much you love your work, there remains a crossover point where it stops being a _requirement_ and becomes, at most, voluntary.)

Which isn't to say that money isn't important at all — especially to people who _don't_ yet have enough of it, and even more especially to those who don't yet even have a plan for _getting_ enough of it — but it's certainly not the most important thing.