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By Johnny, September 21, 2007 9:27 pm

With the ever growing “wants” in my life, I find myself wanting less. For the past couple of months, I’ve been cycling through various “wants” and desires. I first absolutely wanted a new Macbook Pro laptop. My current Dell laptop I’m using is 3 years old and I was running out of hard disk space. I was in the middle of doing some development project for my non-profit and realized that my machine needs more than the 1.5GB that was left. That was my justification to get a whole new machine.

Then there was the lust of buying a new car. The targets of my desires was a Toyota Tacoma truck or a BMW 335i. The truck was an excuse for me to get more physically active by allowing me to carry my mountain bike and other ‘outdoorsy’ items. My justification for a truck was to help persuade me to get more exercise. The beemer was just something I’ve always wanted. Since my car is starting to show it’s 6 years of age and 130K miles of driving, I wanted something luxurious and “nice”. I deserved it damn it!

With my mind preoccupied with these superficial items, I was online on a daily basis looking and researching about them. But then one day I snapped out of it. (Probably with the help of my gf but we don’t need to let her know.) Ever since reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and “The Millionaire Next Door”, I have been practicing the art of not buying crap I don’t need. After this short memory lapse, I decided to buy what I needed at this point in time, a larger hard drive for my laptop. My car is perfectly fine and should last me for awhile so I don’t need a car. Ah it’s good to come back to my senses.

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By Johnny, January 11, 2006 2:11 pm

According to this article: http://biz.yahoo.com/special/live05.html, it costs a family of 4 $370,000 a year to live “well” in Los Angeles. That’s 3rd in the nation behind New York City and Boston. We’re talking about owning 2 houses, one in a nice neighborhood and one in the country side or beach house. 1 kid going to private college and the other one is in 8th grade. 2 luxury cars, a BMW 325i and a Lexus RX 330. Weekend get-aways at resorts, taxes, dining out, and health care costs. The part I didn’t like about this was that the fictional family only saved about 1% of their income to maintain this life style. This is definitely not the lifestyle I want to be pursuing. If this was 2 years ago, I may have been building my goals towards this but after reading The Millionaire Next Door, my views on people spending money extravagantly is rather silly and pointless.

I’ll be happy living in 1 mediocre house with 1 mediocre car, 1 motorcycle, dining at restaurants only on the weekends, and saving about 40-50% of my income towards my future goal of being a “Millionaire Next Door”. 10 more years to go!