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Exploring handcuffs, too late, and maintenance
Logan
June 27, 2024
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Exploring handcuffs, too late, and maintenance
Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!
What’s inside?
One tool to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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One tool to experiment with:
Handcuffs:
You’re under arrest.
There will be no jury. There will be no trial. You’re headed straight to jail, with a sentencing term determined by the length of the payoff terms for the debt you used to buy your status.
There’s something strange about this confrontation; that it’s you arresting you. Before you panic, there is a liberating truth; the key to unlock the handcuffs is in your own pocket.
The heavy, cold, metal handcuffs hug your wrists with an uncomfortable embrace. Restrictive, irritating, yet invisible to the eye. You feel them. You know they’re there, but you can’t quite see them. And you know this: each time you use debt to make a purchase, you feel a painful pinch, you feel the cuffs squeeze a little tighter.
Handcuffs are a trusty tool, used to restrain movement. Police Officers use them to protect themselves and the community by shifting chaos into order. Restricting the risk a threat presents from the freedom of uncontrolled movement.
We all have some handcuffs on, and we wear them around like a fashion accessory.
We do this because these handcuffs are invisible to the external eye. I can use debt to buy a Rolex with the aim to convey status and prestige. You and everyone else can see my fancy silver watch, but you’re not privy to the pressure I feel from the facade of ownership; I wear the watch, but the bank owns it. I’m handcuffed to paying it off.
When the lifestyles we curate, the things we buy, the images we portray, are financed through debt — other people’s money — we arrest ourselves; we become confined and shackled to the possessions we don’t possess.
Borrowed money to buy goods creates borrowed goods. The possessions then become the commanders of our futures, spelling out, with painstaking clarity, the exact path we must take with our future dollars.
The decisions we make today seal a future for us tomorrow. We have to own up to the consequences that we have crafted, and we have to know that debt is a dictator that we’ve empowered through our spending habits.
Look around at your things, are they yours? Are you free of their control?
The key to the cuffs is in your back pocket. It’s been there the whole time.
You can free yourself of the monthly payment burdens by committing to climbing out of the debt hole and staying away from these golden shackles. It’s the norm, so we do it. We use debt to buy things and work to pay them off. But why is it the norm? Does it have to be that way for you and me?
Before you finance your next item, think about the sentencing term you’re subjecting yourself to, is it worth it?
are you handcuffed to your stuff?
Two quotes on too late:
A lot of people own the incorrect belief that it’s too late to improve their money, “If I knew then what I know now” goes the old rumination, the “it’s too late for me” line. But it’s not.
“It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.”
“My father used to say that it's never too late to do anything you wanted to do. And he said, 'You never know what you can accomplish until you try.'”
Three questions on maintenance:
What parts of my financial house require ongoing maintenance?
If I don’t want to do the maintenance myself, who might I hire?
What ongoing repair issues keep popping up because I’ve used bandaids and not full fixes?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
We don’t own our things on loan.
Shackled to our impulse,
Locked up with misery.
You hold the only key that sets you free.
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Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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