Not all mistakes are created equal, and you’ve got a couple ahead of you that could turn out to be among the most expensive mistakes you can make.
Not all mistakes are created equal, and you’ve got a couple ahead of you that could turn out to be among the most expensive mistakes you can make.But by the end of this article, you will have a clear understanding of what you should pay attention to in Life!
1 – Thinking life is pre-defined or destined
The moment you think your future has already been pre-written, you lose your drive to alter it, and what happens then is that you default to whatever the world randomly puts in front of you.
The biggest difference between self-made rich people and poor people is the confidence that the acquisition of wealth is not only fully under your control but also a moral responsibility towards your family.
Never assume life will turn out one way or another; bend it to your will instead.
Statistically, optimists outperform pessimists in life.
While the optimist goes for it, the pessimist assumes the answer will inevitably be no, so there is no point in trying.
But once you do try, sure, you’ll get a lot of no’s, but every once in a while, you’ll get a yes when you weren’t expecting it.
You only need one or two yeses for your life to change!
If I told you that you are 20 min’s away from changing your life, how fast would you go through the first 20…?
This applies to business, love, and life.
Not asking becomes an incredibly expensive mistake to make over the long run.
Speaking of love…
2 – Divorce or marrying the wrong person
Very few financial events can wipe out over half of your net worth.
Even fewer can wipe out the happiness of being alive.
Whom you marry is the 2nd most important decision you will make in your life!
The most painful prison is a home without love.
Why? Because the alternative is having someone who’s there for you in the darkest moments, in the toughest times.
Your success and your happiness grow exponentially in value when you get to share them with people you love and who love you back.
Divorce breaks all of that.
The only people better off after a divorce are the person who walked away and the lawyers. Who, by the way, end up charging you between 15 and 30%, but more on that in a second.
Marrying the wrong person is like having two wheels on a car missing.
Sure, you can still push the car forward, but progress isn’t supposed to require that much effort.
A real partner is an asset, not a liability!
Someone who contributes actively to the well-being of the family.
Marrying the wrong person is an incredibly expensive mistake to make, so pick carefully and pick for the long run.
3– Having children too early and out of wedlock
Most people have no idea how expensive kids really are.
They see the folks in the trailer parks doing it and assume that since they’re doing better than them, they should be fine.
As of 2022, the average cost of raising a child in the US to 18 years of age is around $288,094, or $16,005 per year.
Other sources estimate the number to be even higher.
In Western Europe, the cost is pretty similar to that in the US. For example, in Italy, the average cost of raising a child from 0-18 years old is $175,642.
Even in countries like the Philippines, expect to pay around $3,000 per year, totaling over $50,000, to get a child to the age of 18.
And the truth is, it will be a financial constraint even if you’re decently positioned in life, and most people don’t realize it.
Having a child when you have yet to mature as an individual is a massively expensive mistake, especially since we all want to give our kids a proper shot at life.
By having children too early and out of wedlock, you’re not only self-sabotaging yourself, but you’re sabotaging your child as well.
Since they will grow up without the proper guidance and tools needed to develop into fully functioning adults.
4– Student debt for a useless degree
The real economic value to a degree holder is going down year by year, while the prices for obtaining said degree keep going up.
This inverse correlation has gotten to the point where, for example, a bachelor’s degree in advertising will cost you roughly 100,000 dollars.
The catch is that high-level work in advertising does not require a degree.
The only way for you to economically put that degree to work is. If you keep going through the pyramid scheme that is; modern-day education and get a master’s rather than a Ph.D. And then eventually teach.
Modern-day education is a pyramid scheme
Do you realize the mental impact of being 25 years old with 200,000 dollars worth of student debt when you start out in life?
This is what I’m talking about when I say that student debt is an insanely expensive mistake to make when it comes to useless degrees!
Debt is modern-day slavery!
Somebody else will reap the financial benefits of your economic efforts until you buy your freedom back.
Mix that with how fast technology is changing, how economically unstable the entire system is. Constant pressure, stress, and hustle-culture mixed with wokeness.
And the need to be a multi-hyphenated individual…. and you end up with a recipe for disaster.
College majors with the highest unemployment rate
My bet is that apprenticeships and trade schools are going to become the go-to options for real-life skills.
As for traditional education: it will completely open up and be web-based.
As long as you pass your exams, you should be able to study at and graduate from any university anywhere in the world.
Degrees will be democratized and internationally accepted.
5– Not buying the book/the course/the app
The irony is incredible—how people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college degree.
But will not buy a course or even a self-development book on the grounds that it’s too expensive.
Modern society has evolved to a point where for things to be seen as valuable they either have to be free…
OR… really, really expensive.
Everything in between has been scraped off as not worth the trouble. I believe that’s exactly where the highest value arbitrage is.
Today, you could take a class on how to refurbish old furniture for a couple of hundred bucks in person or tens of dollars online.
Someone will literally show you what tools you need, how to use them, and how to create value for someone else.
In just a couple of months, you can get really good at it. Now you have fundamental skills that are valuable.
Refurbishing furniture, lawn work, interior design, and implementation—all of these can pay more on a yearly basis.
Than you would get as a salary working for a bank.
These are all $100,000-per-year opportunities that do not require massive investments to start; they just require you to WORK.
The problem with society is that they think once you earn a degree, you are entitled to a certain salary without having to create the economic equivalent in value.
They see high salaries as a reward for their ability to get a degree, which is no longer true.
Your ability to generate income is directly correlated to the following:
Your ability to execute (skill level)
The need for your skills (demand)
The number of people you are competing with for the job opportunity (supply)
This right here is your MBA, and it didn’t cost you 100 grand.
You will find more real value in five $20 books than you will find in your degree. So don’t make this expensive mistake.
The cost of education will keep going down, but it will always be worth paying for things of value.
6– Going for the cheapest option
Almost always in life, going for the second cheapest is a better financial move than going for the cheapest.
Think of tattoo artists, plastic surgeons, and even lawyers, and accountants.
Definitely, going with the cheapest one will cost you way more in the long run than you’re saving.
There’s an old saying: If you buy cheap, you buy twice!
Because cheap products break more easily.
But the more accurate position would be:
If you buy cheap, you will pay 10 times the amount to fix it!
The distinction to be made here boils down to economic value.
Wouldn’t you pay $1000 more for a good accountant that could save you an additional $10,000 every year?
These kinds of deals are always available on the market. Going for the cheaper option is usually a lot more expensive in the long run.
And since I’ve mentioned lawyers…
7 Hiring a lawyer instead of mediation
Settlement outside of court is always the more economic situation.
Talk to people. Apologize if you must. Don’t make this expensive mistake.
It’s in your best interest to figure it out and move on.
There’s no reason to sue your neighbor or family members for petty stuff
The only people who win in these situations are the lawyers.
Just so you know, divorce lawyers charge $3k–$5k just to get started on your case, and an additional $300-$500 per hour on top of that.
That’s not including court fees and other costs associated with divorce.
Since you were unable to mediate the situation and now you’re going to court, these things will take years to come to a conclusion.
And lawyers are economically incentivized to drag things along.
8 “Investing” into your friends’ business
This is one of those situations where you will lose either way.
If you say no, you lose a friend. If you say yes and they waste the money, you generally lose the friend and the money.
Also, your friends aren’t as business savvy as they present themselves to be, because if they were, they wouldn’t be coming to you asking for money.
These are usually the people that this week are doing some Amazon flipping, next week they plan to grow fruit, and the next they’re launching an AI start-up.
You know them well, they’re perpetual entrepreneurs with no entrepreneurial rewards to show.
It gets even messier when it comes to helping out the family.
As a rule of thumb – and please remember this for the rest of your life: Think of all the money that you give to your family as a donation, not a loan.
If, from the start, you’re ok with never getting the money back and position it like that to them.
The relationship might survive.
The best of family members will go above and beyond to repay you even if the expectation of payback isn’t there.
9 Preventable medical expenses
Another massively expensive mistake. Take teeth for example.
It’s cheaper to fix a cavity than get an implant, and this philosophy extends to everything in life.
The more you ignore the problem, the larger the dragon gets!
Not taking diabetes seriously could cost you your vision. And don’t get us started on not having health insurance in a country like the United States.
You might not realize this, but most of the largest medical expenses you will encounter in your life are actually preventable through a healthier lifestyle.
For example, heart disease and stroke, which have the highest death rate, are also the most expensive to treat and responsible for six of the most expensive medical procedures.
Here you have the average cost for these:
The cost of the medical procedures
Raising your fitness level just a little bit could save you a fortune in the long run and allow you to enjoy more of your life.
10 Not figuring out the timing
If you are looking for the one skill that has a massively-disproportional outcome-to-effort ratio, it’s timing.
Understanding when it’s a good time to do something and when it isn’t would make all the difference.
From confessing your love to your crush to quitting your job or making an investment, timing will alter the outcome.
Bad timing can become a very expensive mistake real quick. Think of the people who bought a brand new home in August 2007.
Think of the people who bought Bitcoin for $68,000.
Both of these might not be bad investments over the next 50 years… But 12 months later, you could’ve bought three times the home value, or three times the BTC.
Which at the end of your investment period could result in a dramatically different outcome.
If you started investing in the stock market in January 2000,
Stock market – Jan 2000
It would take you 13 years to get back to 0.
Stock market – Jan 2013
Think about that. 13 years of no profits because of bad timing.
On the contrary, if you were to start investing in 2009,
Stock market – Feb 2009
In the same 13 years, you would have received 5 times your investment. That’s the power of timing.
Stock market – Jan 2022
These kinds of lessons and insights are hard for the average person to comprehend because most lack the understanding of how to actually take advantage of moments in time.
And speaking of time:
11 Not showing up on time
Lack of punctuality is one of the main curses of the modern-day generation. I can’t emphasize enough how expensive this mistake can be.
You don’t realize just how important it is until it hits you right in the face.
Be late for an audition, and the role goes to the person who wasn’t.
Be late to an investor meeting, and they walk away from the deal.
Be late to catch the train, and you might miss sitting next to your future wife or husband.
Every time you are late, you are throwing more chaos into your life. You will rush, you will forget things, and you will make mistakes.
Life isn’t like school, where you could duct tape something together the night before and pass.
An extra day of work and thought going into a project could substantially change the end product.
It could be the difference between getting a promotion and being passed over for one.
It could be the difference between signing your dream client and losing them.
If you can’t organize your time to physically be at the place you and the other party mutually agreed to be.
There’s no way for you to actually build a life you’re proud of, because the first one is incredibly easy and the latter is incredibly hard.
Take care of the easy before you take care of the hard.
12 Not reading the contract
How many of you signed the document straight when they put it in front of you?
Reading contracts isn’t something you learn to do early on because the contracts that are put in front of you early on have little at stake.
The moment you start progressing in life, what is at stake with each contract builds up.
Getting good at reading contracts is free. Getting a lawyer to look at them on your behalf is fairly cheap.
Do not skip this step.
It could mean the difference between a life’s fortune and just a small bonus.
Or even worse: years of legal battles.
Moreover, to realize just how expensive this mistake can be, just see what happened to the artist formerly known as Prince.
13 Buying a perpetual liability
Some people are in the habit of buying bottomless money pits.
You keep throwing money at it, and nothing’s happening.
There’s another saying you’ll hear among the rich: planes and boats: “The best 2 days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it”
If you think buying a private jet or a yacht is the hard part, you are mistaken, my friend.
Once you own the liability, the bills start coming in.
Hangar space is incredibly expensive, as is docking space.
As a rule of thumb, you can expect to pay around $500,000 to $1 million annually in operating costs to own a private jet.
When it comes to yachts, expect to pay roughly 10% of their value in operating costs (eg:100,000 for a 1-1.5M yacht) if it’s one of the smaller ones.
The bigger you go, the crazier the numbers get. So make sure you avoid making the expensive mistake of buying a perpetual liability.
It’s the same with passion projects, like the folks who try to restore an old car or an old home and end up putting in more money than the home is worth.
14 Jumping before you arrange a safe landing
Why would you move to another city or country without securing a job first?
Sure, it might sound like an adventure, and you think to yourself.
3 months should be enough for me to figure it out, but what if it isn’t?
You’re in a new place, eating, renting, and commuting out of pocket, hoping that something will eventually show up. The only thing up is your stress.
It’s the same with people who quit their jobs on the spot.
Be strategic about it. Give yourself a competitive advantage by building a parachute before you jump.
Being impulsive could cost you six to 12 months of hard work if you aren’t careful.
15 Living someone else’s version of your life
What if, at the end of your life, you look back at it and regret it? How terrible would that be?!
You had this chance, this opportunity to live life the way you wanted to.
And you blew it because you lived the version your parents, your teachers, your neighbors, or society told you to.
You have this great opportunity to make something extraordinary a reality; you might as well live it in such a way that you smile at the end of the journey.
A life you don’t live is a life wasted!
Pay attention to everything I mentioned on this list, as it will add up to a life well lived.
Location Where you live is the most important decision you will ever make in your life!
As it will determine your economic prospects, who your friends are, what your values are, and who you marry.
Location is a tool you can leverage to exponentially transform your life.
You might currently have the skills to build the future you want, but your current location might prohibit it.
If this was one of those notification pop-ups. The life of your dreams isn’t available in your location!
Take this opportunity right now to ask yourself:
If you could move to any place in the world where your progress would be accelerated, where would you go?
Think about it deeply, and you’ll soon realize that your happiness levels will increase as you think about what kind of life you would live if you were to move.
What you’re feeling is a sample of the real change that you are capable of.
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