Substance Over Form: The True Wealth Paradigm

GOSPEL OF LITTLE’S

“All that glitters is not gold” is a phrase from the great Shakespeare’s famous play ‘Merchant of Venice’. Why is this phrase so relevant as always?

It is so relevant where there are people who believes a successful 1000 cr. superstar Prabhas movie can resolve all economic crisis . It is so relevant where rich people become richer and poor hit the rock bottom day by day. WAKE UP DUDE! Sometimes it’s neither capitalism nor socialism, IT IS VICTIMISM.

Dude, let me introduce an accounting principle, which says ‘SUBSTANCE,NOT MERE FORM’...What does it mean?

Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared in a television show without a Rolex watch, no Gucci belt, no trendy outfit-Yet he’s one of the highest paid CEOs in the World and when he speaks it is the substance, not mere form matters.

Money has many ironies. Of course, money increases your purchasing power, it can raise your social standards, it can offer you good holiday destinations. But does it really make you wealthy? Does it really offer you happiness? If not just pause a while and digest, It is the ‘Substance not mere form’.

Morgan Housel in his book ‘The Physcology of Money’ says,Wealth is mostly what you don’t see. It’s beyond material appearances. We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars, Homes, Instagram photos.

Infact wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn and the clothes forgone. wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see. That’s not how we think about wealth, because you can’t contextualize what you can’t see. Investor Bill Mann once wrote: “There is no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on really nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have, and to not spend money you don’t have. It’s really that simple.

But we should be careful to define the difference between wealthy and rich.

Rich is a current income. Someone driving a 10 crore car is almost certainly rich, because even if they purchased the car with debt you need a certain level of income to afford the monthly payment. Same with those who live in big homes. It’s not hard to spot rich people. They often go out of their way to make themselves known.

But wealth is hidden. It’s income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now.

There are, of course, wealthy people who also spend a lot of money on stuff. But even in those cases what we see is their richness, not their wealth. We see the cars they chose to buy and perhaps the school they choose to send their kids to. We don’t see the savings, retirement accounts, or investment portfolios.

So it’s always better to be reasonable than coldly rational. Realize,

“YOU ARE NOT SPREADSHEET. YOU ARE COLD BLOODED HUMAN. A SCREWED UP, EMOTIONAL PERSON.”

Jack Bogle, the late founder of Vanguard, spent his career on a crusade to promote low-cost passive index investing. Many thought it interesting that his son found a career as an active, high-fee hedge fund and mutual fund manager. Bogle—the man who said high-fee funds violate “the humble rules of arithmetic”—invested some of his own money in his son’s funds. What’s the explanation? “We do some things for family reasons,” Bogle told The Wall Street Journal. “If it’s not consistent, well, life isn’t always consistent.

Here is the key. The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.

People want to become wealthier to make them happier.But if there’s a common denominator in happiness, a universal fuel of joy, it’s that people want to control their lives. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

More than your salary, more than the size of your house, more than the prestige of your job, control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, can really make you happy.

A small amount of wealth means the ability to take a few days off work when you’re sick without breaking the bank. A bit more means waiting for a good job to come around after you get laid off, rather than having to take the first one you find. That can be life changing. People like to feel like they’re in control, in the drivers’ seat.

In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience.

He wrote: No one-not a single person out of a thousand said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.

No one-not a single person said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success.

No one-not a single person said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power. What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children.

“Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them,” Pillemer writes.

Take it from those who have lived through everything: Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.

Yes, it is the substance, not mere form. Even gilded tombs do worms unfold.

"Q. Which is the richest bird in the world? :OstRICH."😬

Mathew Sebastian CA. Finalist

Reference: Physcology of Money