The Micro and Macro Building Blocks of Wealth
By Billy B | Money
I had an epiphany this week: Our financial present and futures are created from all of the micro-and-macro financial decisions in our pasts. From a personal perspective, as I look back on my life, it wasn’t one lucky break or genius skill that sent us skyrocketing toward being rich. It was a routine set of every-day decisions, mindset, and attitude, on a micro and macro level, that led us be become relatively wealthy ($266K net worth), in a relatively short amount of time (6 years.)
As I realized this, my mind was thrust into a time-traveling speed warp. My entire life appeared in a collage of memories. These visions contained all of the micro and macro decisions I’ve made throughout my lifetime. These memories were the primordial substance that grew into the present and future I am living now. As I stared into the collage of old memories, I saw our wealth is just a collection of micro and macro financial decisions that put us on the right path. Below is a list of the best micro-and-macro decisions that helped us succeed with our money:
Macro Decision #1: Skip the Expensive Wedding.
In 2015. we were in love and wanted to get married. But weddings are crazy-expensive and we wanted our marriage to start on a financially strong foundation. So we had a decision to make: Pay for an expensive wedding. Or do it on a tiny budget and learn how to invest the money we did have. We chose to avoid an expensive wedding by getting married for $600 in my parent’s living room with immediate-family only. We cooked a steak dinner after as a group, and we rode off into the sunset as a newly married couple with a lot of money still in our pockets.
It was a liberating, and stress-free experience to start building the life we wanted from day #1 of our marriage, rather than feeling the pressure to host and pay for a wedding that other people wanted more than us.
Macro Decision #2: Buy a Modest House.
Since we didn’t have the cost of a big wedding to pay off, we were able to buy a house with a 20% down payment to start our life together. But since we were young and still starting out, we couldn’t afford our dream house right away. Our budget limited us to choose between a single-family home in a less desirable area, or a multi-family home (townhouse, twin-home) in a really nice area.
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U.S. consumers can request a free annual credit report from major agencies.
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