My parents chose to spend quite a bit of what money they had on education for my sister and myself when we were young. This gave me an appreciation for quality over quantity, and although I fell into quite serious debt through my own making twice in my adult life, like an idiot, this combination of affairs led me to more fully appreciate how it’s better to save and wait for things which you want but which are slightly out of your immediate economic means.
Although I’ve never read his books, I came across this passage by Terry Pratchett today, which sums up this point and the lesson I learned the hard way. (Even though I have never been, and will never be, rich.)
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Terry Pratchett, Discworld
Leave a Reply