I'm much closer to the second person than the first person. I have never owned a new car, but I do own a large screen television. However, I waited until the prices came down befor I bought one and I paid cash. I will also wait a year or two longer before buying a BlueRay DVD player so the prices can come down. I have paid cash for every car I have ever owned. I have no credit card debt, but my banks send me letters each month trying to loan me hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have shredded everyone so far. In the future, I may take out one of those loans in order to start yet another business.

I have three seperate sources of income any one of which would be able to pay my bills. However, all three revenue flows were chosen to be stable even in a depression. My largest source of income was specifically chosen to become more stable in the event of peak oil.

According to government statistics, my net income puts me in the upper class, but I live in a modest house in one of the poorer sections of town. The advantage of where I live is that it is in the city, but it has more trees than just about any other part and looks like a park. My car is very humble (I joke at church that it is the kind of car that Jesus would drive). I used to have two gold rings but they would get scratched easily so now all of my jewelry was bought at Piercing Pagoda and is made of stainless steel. It wears extremely well and many people ask me where I bought it because it is stylish and understated. By the way, anodozed stainless steel looks just like gold but is a heck of a lot more durable. If you are careful when you buy luxery items, you can own things that look very expensive and last a long time, but cost little.

So, where do I splurge? My wife and I do buy the things that we want but our tastes are very simple. We believe that the most important things in life are friends, family, and education. Our biggest expenses each month for ourselves (as opposed to business investments) is the food we buy when our friends come over for parties. In addition, our children will go to the best private schools that money can buy. My wife and I know the educational systems very well so we know how important private school is. What we saved in our ultracheap house with almost no property taxes, will go to school tuition.

Am I in debt? yes. However, my biggest debts are school loans which I will take 25 years to pay off because the interest is only 3% which means that inflation makes this debt pretty much disappear. Even if I owned 40 billion dollars, I would have taken out the largest school loans that I could because the interest rate at the time made it free money. My other debts are rather large business loans, but I am very conservative in my business practices and try not to extend myself very much. Besides, my business ought to do better the higher oil prices get.

Well enough tooting my horn. Being that my lifestyle is so modest, this is about the only opportunity that I have to bask in my hard work. I guess that the other reward is that I sleep well at night because I have no money stress and my wife shares my money values.

To sum it up. My financial role model is Joseph in the bible. He built storehouse in the fat years and prospered in the lean years. My symbol is a holly branch because it bears fruit in the winter.

Thor