Everyone talks about how the solution to money problems is to make more money.
The opposite of this idea is to stop being cheap. Being cheap unconsciously screws up your life in spectacular ways. And none of us is immune. Not even you.
To stop being cheap sounds easy. It’s not because it’s psychological. But if you can overcome this mental demon, you will go on to make ungodly amounts of money.
Here’s how I overcame being cheap (and have helped others do the same).
# The simple philosophy of being cheap
Your mind tells you to be cheap because it’s a survival mechanism.
If you run out of money, your survival is at risk. Being homeless is difficult and so is begging for food. So it makes sense that our 100,000-year-old brains want to protect us from this tragedy out of love.
I wouldn’t wish being homeless on my worst enemy.
My family faced this reality several times when I was a kid. And one of my good friends has been homeless for ~5 years while raising two children. Anyone who underestimates this reality is deeply mistaken.
While your brain loves to jump to worst-case financial scenarios, most of them are fantasies that will never play out.
When you focus too much on your survival you assume everyone is out to rob you. You become overly skeptical. You say “That sounds like a pyramid scheme.” And you may become so toxic you start blaming rich people for your problems, which is a slippery slope into hell on Earth.
At its core, being cheap seems smart.
“If I pay less for this thing, then I will have more money to spend on other things.” What no one talks about, though, is the more something costs you, the more you value it—and the more likely you are to use it fully.
Take consulting as an example. I’ve been doing it for 12 years. Without a doubt, the most successful people I’ve worked with have coincidentally also spent the most money with me. Bar none. It sounds wild to say that, but the data doesn’t lie.
It’s not because I’m great. It’s because money focuses the mind.
It makes you do the work and get the help you need, so you can justify the investment. In that new frame of mind, you bizarrely want things to cost more, not less, because that’s how you get the most out of spending the money.
# Being cheap secretly pisses people off
I used to be a hard-nosed negotiator.
I learned this tactic by watching the TV show American Pickers like a junkie. I applied their way of life to every purchase I made.
A lot of things went wrong.
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