I have touched on this topic before, but I want to revisit it.
Is creating wealth about the money or what it can provide you? At one time my husband and business partner focused very heavily on how much money can we earn and how we can earn more. During this time however we lost focus on a few things and along with the increase in income we steadily increased our expenses and the material things we had to keep up with the increase in money. Unfortunately when the Real Estate Markets changed a bit this way of doing things bit us. We now were forced to find ways to make more money to pay for the increased expenses and stuff. We became a slave to the money.
We had to take a step back and re-evaluate our goals and lifestyle. This forced us to change a lot of how we do things. Unfortunately at one time we had amassed a lot of credit card debt which was used to finance some or our Real Estate projects. We have since paid off all of our credit card debt and no longer use credit cards as a financial vehicle. We have also created an emergency fund to handle the bumps life throws at us.
The main thing though is we re-evaluated and determined that wealth creation for us is not about the money and the toys, but the security and what we can do in our life. Spending time as a family is very important to us and if we are always working to create more dollars then we are not enjoying the lifestyle we want.
Money is important and it does allow you to build a lifestyle – but your lifestyle doesn’t have to revolve around having to always make more.
FYI – I read a similar post on this topic from a new blog I stumbled across today called Money Cactus. He did a great job of covering this topic as well. You can read the post here: Wealth Creation: It’s Not About the Money