Debate offshoot - The importance of delayed gratification

AnnPT77

Warning: Ill-focused ramble coming. Read at your own risk. :flowerforyou:

I feel like focusing on the term "deferred gratification" is not a good plan (even though I might've been first to use in the two threads, shorthand-wise, by bringing in the SME, which was kind of a red herring or red flag to a metaphorical bull, or something bull, anyway).

But I do think the tradeoff between long-term and short-term goals is a meaningful thing to consider. For one, looking at it that way is less offensive (i.e., doesn't so inherently set off the negative implications that @lynn_glenmont outlined so well).

Favoring the short-term (vivid) over the long term (distant/theoretical), and over-reacting to immediate circumstances rather than fully considering longer-term issues and trends: Those are things that humans tend to struggle with across a variety of domains, and it applies to personal finance across all income classes in one way or another.

Examples: People who get into the stock market when indexes are all high and frothy and everyone's talking about them, drop out of it disappointed at the inevitable trough, then (burned) take their remaining bucks into money market funds or savings accounts or put it under the mattress during the historically-predictable recovery that follows. People who don't want to "fail to enjoy life because uncle Joe died before retirement" (I exaggerate slightly), so take expensive vacations every year at the 'cost' of retirement savings (even matched 401k/403b/etc.!), without ever doing the math about maybe a really nice but not top-tier vacation, combined with a bit more retirement sock-away (with employer match). BTW: I'm not blue-skying about silly rich people here. I'm talking about actual people I actually know: Friends, co-workers, relatives, regular blue-collar and white-collar middle-income working people.

One of my co-workers even borrowed against his 403b to add rooms to his house (family size didn't change, they just wanted more room). He figured, as far as I could tell, that he'd have to keep working forever anyway because retirement was always a pipe dream, so he might as well have a comfy house to live in. This was a smart guy, good worker, but with a tendency toward conceptual myopia in some realms, one of which was (IMO) personal finance.

Same guy, BTW, would pretty much always take his roughly day-a-month sick time as it was earned (often on a Monday ) then sadly had to go on multi-week upaid leave when his newborn son tragically needed emergency surgery and extended ICU for a heart issue (we had good health bennies, fortunately, but he risked losing a month of that due to absences, if we hadn't made sure to keep him within the lines on that. (I was his immediate manager BTW.) (I'd add that we could accumulate sick time for literally our whole career if we didn't use it, plus we got a 50% payout for our balance up to some crazy-high number of hours (1100, maybe?) at retirement, at hourly equivalent of final salary. Despite taking a boatload of sick time off during that inconvenient cancer-treatment hobby I had that one year, I still got a nice check at separation.)

Health risks through poor nutrition or overeating or overdrinking (short of addiction, which is a different animal) fall into this present-desires-centric pattern.

I have no idea how to shift that thinking, even in myself. I'd observe that people are usually more influenced by vivid first-person stories/case-studies, and less influenced by evidence and statistics.

This may be counter to your personal cognitive style **, but take a look at popular magazines (I'm most familiar to those aimed at female homemakers, but it's not unique to them): They often start with a vivid case study (including a person's full name, even if "changed to protect privacy" , and include 'irrelevant' personal details about the person, to make them more relatable).

After setting up that story that the reader can empathize with and relate to - maybe just the "problem" part of the story - the articles start bringing in statistics/experts' quotes (personalizing the experts with names and personal details, often, too ), plus probably somewhere along the way some other relateable individuals' experiences (more names, direct quotes, details), then circle back to how the initial relateable person solved his/her problem in ways that illustrate and exploit the stats and experts' ideas (vivid specifics in the solution part, as well).

Stories!

I also would say that most people are torn in lots of directions, and modern life is very cognitively complex (too complex for even intelligent people to know basic things that it would be helpful for them to know, in all the realms they need to deal with). Therefore, many decisions people make are not really decisions at all, but rather simply the people doing things that they think are the normal, standard things to do in their circumstances, without really analyzing details (aside: these are conveyor belts, in the sense of my previous post on that point (maybe in the other thread? don't recall)). So, part of the issue is to somehow kick ourselves (or others) out of a default pattern, to turn the autopilot off and really learn about and think analytically about what we're doing.

So, if all of our friends are buzzing about going low carb to lose weight, and all those mags in the grocery line are blasting about the magic of keto, odds are really high that a lot of us will think that's the latest and best way to lose weight, and we'll set off looking for info about how to do it (which sources will reinforce its goodness and necessity), and we're off to the races. Odds of looking into alternatives to it are much lower.

(Since this is MFP, I'll note for other readers that I think low carb and keto are perfectly valid strategies for weight loss, literally necessary for some, helpful for some others. It just happens to be the thing that's on the tabloid covers lately. A while back, I think it was Paleo that was all trumpeted about, years back it was low fat, South Beach did a turn, I think volumetrics had a brief run, etc. It's always something that's hitting the most headlines; it isn't that the trumpeted methods are bad or wrong, just that they're not the exclusive magic the popularizers would have you think.)

Similarly, if your parents were hesitant to use debt to pay for consumables (vs. assets) or at all, you might be likely to do that by default. Otherwise, you might be heavily influenced by advertising of credit sources, and by knowing that your neighbors are ramping up debt annually to fund vacations or whatever. (As an aside, I think one of the ways advertising really works is to create an impression that "all the happy pretty successful people do X" so we'll do X, too, kind of on autopilot. Humans, IMO, are very norm-driven, unless something kicks us out of the rut.)

A helpful thing, I suspect, when trying to get others out of autopilot mode (and maybe ourselves, as well), is to exploit the fact that many of us also like to feel like rebels or iconoclasts, or like we have insider information that other people don't have (the popular diets do this despite being talked about everywhere, which is kind of a fun trick). Some of the financial popularizers do a bit of this, I think: Dave Ramsey, Kiyosaki, some of the frugal investing advocates, etc.

On both diet and financial fronts (and I'm sure others), I think there are also simple facts that don't sink in unless someone really highlights them, that can provide a bit of a kick, too. It's easier to give examples on the financial front. Think about the number of people who thought they saved money (overall) when they had a mortgage, because they could deduct the interest on their income taxes and get a bigger refund. (The parts of the equation are separated in time, most people don't see the total dollar net all in one place at one time, etc.). Same effect in the appeal of cash-back credit cards, where you get 1% or 2% (under fine-print conditions) cash back but pay multi-percent interest if you don't pay off your balance. Another is the part of mortgage amortization where quite a number of smart people to whom I've spoken didn't seem to realize that there was a phase where for the price of a pizza or two a month, they could avoid hundreds to thousands of dollars of future interest expense and/or cut the effective loan period much faster than month for month.

Some of what's behind all of this is that most of us, going back to elementary school, are/were bad at "story problems" in the first place: I certainly heard peers whining about how we weren't ever going to have to figure out the closing distance between speeding trains in real life. Which is true . . . but adult life really is a huge series of story problems, on diverse topics, some of them really high stakes (investing, mortgage and other debt, calorie counting, drug/supplement side effects and benefits, behavioral health risks . . . .).

Heading off on another tangent, have you ever read "Portfolios of the Poor" (by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, Ruthven)? It's an analysis of year-long financial diaries of slum-dwellers world-wide who lived on <$2 a day, and their financial strategizing . . . which is often much more nuanced and suitable than strategies espoused by well-meaning "experts" who lack a clear understanding of the contingencies that surround their decision-making, and which falsely make it appear irrational or random to outside observers.

@CSARdiver , I think the above ramble is not really on-point to the specific question in your OP on this thread, but is consistent with the larger theme about marketing, misleading, conceptual traps, etc., that bear on many people's behavior (mine, certainly) related to both diet/fitness and personal finance.

** It's not my cognitive style either, really, but I'm also not usually sold by pure statistics, either, so I'm not pretending "special rationality" here, just quirky irrationality.

CSARdiver

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Warning: Ill-focused ramble coming. Read at your own risk. :flowerforyou:

I feel like focusing on the term "deferred gratification" is not a good plan (even though I might've been first to use in the two threads, shorthand-wise, by bringing in the SME, which was kind of a red herring or red flag to a metaphorical bull, or something bull, anyway).

But I do think the tradeoff between long-term and short-term goals is a meaningful thing to consider. For one, looking at it that way is less offensive (i.e., doesn't so inherently set off the negative implications that @lynn_glenmont outlined so well).

Favoring the short-term (vivid) over the long term (distant/theoretical), and over-reacting to immediate circumstances rather than fully considering longer-term issues and trends: Those are things that humans tend to struggle with across a variety of domains, and it applies to personal finance across all income classes in one way or another.

Examples: People who get into the stock market when indexes are all high and frothy and everyone's talking about them, drop out of it disappointed at the inevitable trough, then (burned) take their remaining bucks into money market funds or savings accounts or put it under the mattress during the historically-predictable recovery that follows. People who don't want to "fail to enjoy life because uncle Joe died before retirement" (I exaggerate slightly), so take expensive vacations every year at the 'cost' of retirement savings (even matched 401k/403b/etc.!), without ever doing the math about maybe a really nice but not top-tier vacation, combined with a bit more retirement sock-away (with employer match). BTW: I'm not blue-skying about silly rich people here. I'm talking about actual people I actually know: Friends, co-workers, relatives, regular blue-collar and white-collar middle-income working people.

One of my co-workers even borrowed against his 403b to add rooms to his house (family size didn't change, they just wanted more room). He figured, as far as I could tell, that he'd have to keep working forever anyway because retirement was always a pipe dream, so he might as well have a comfy house to live in. This was a smart guy, good worker, but with a tendency toward conceptual myopia in some realms, one of which was (IMO) personal finance.

Same guy, BTW, would pretty much always take his roughly day-a-month sick time as it was earned (often on a Monday ) then sadly had to go on multi-week upaid leave when his newborn son tragically needed emergency surgery and extended ICU for a heart issue (we had good health bennies, fortunately, but he risked losing a month of that due to absences, if we hadn't made sure to keep him within the lines on that. (I was his immediate manager BTW.) (I'd add that we could accumulate sick time for literally our whole career if we didn't use it, plus we got a 50% payout for our balance up to some crazy-high number of hours (1100, maybe?) at retirement, at hourly equivalent of final salary. Despite taking a boatload of sick time off during that inconvenient cancer-treatment hobby I had that one year, I still got a nice check at separation.)

Health risks through poor nutrition or overeating or overdrinking (short of addiction, which is a different animal) fall into this present-desires-centric pattern.

I have no idea how to shift that thinking, even in myself. I'd observe that people are usually more influenced by vivid first-person stories/case-studies, and less influenced by evidence and statistics.

This may be counter to your personal cognitive style **, but take a look at popular magazines (I'm most familiar to those aimed at female homemakers, but it's not unique to them): They often start with a vivid case study (including a person's full name, even if "changed to protect privacy" , and include 'irrelevant' personal details about the person, to make them more relatable).

After setting up that story that the reader can empathize with and relate to - maybe just the "problem" part of the story - the articles start bringing in statistics/experts' quotes (personalizing the experts with names and personal details, often, too ), plus probably somewhere along the way some other relateable individuals' experiences (more names, direct quotes, details), then circle back to how the initial relateable person solved his/her problem in ways that illustrate and exploit the stats and experts' ideas (vivid specifics in the solution part, as well).

Stories!

I also would say that most people are torn in lots of directions, and modern life is very cognitively complex (too complex for even intelligent people to know basic things that it would be helpful for them to know, in all the realms they need to deal with). Therefore, many decisions people make are not really decisions at all, but rather simply the people doing things that they think are the normal, standard things to do in their circumstances, without really analyzing details (aside: these are conveyor belts, in the sense of my previous post on that point (maybe in the other thread? don't recall)). So, part of the issue is to somehow kick ourselves (or others) out of a default pattern, to turn the autopilot off and really learn about and think analytically about what we're doing.

So, if all of our friends are buzzing about going low carb to lose weight, and all those mags in the grocery line are blasting about the magic of keto, odds are really high that a lot of us will think that's the latest and best way to lose weight, and we'll set off looking for info about how to do it (which sources will reinforce its goodness and necessity), and we're off to the races. Odds of looking into alternatives to it are much lower.

(Since this is MFP, I'll note for other readers that I think low carb and keto are perfectly valid strategies for weight loss, literally necessary for some, helpful for some others. It just happens to be the thing that's on the tabloid covers lately. A while back, I think it was Paleo that was all trumpeted about, years back it was low fat, South Beach did a turn, I think volumetrics had a brief run, etc. It's always something that's hitting the most headlines; it isn't that the trumpeted methods are bad or wrong, just that they're not the exclusive magic the popularizers would have you think.)

Similarly, if your parents were hesitant to use debt to pay for consumables (vs. assets) or at all, you might be likely to do that by default. Otherwise, you might be heavily influenced by advertising of credit sources, and by knowing that your neighbors are ramping up debt annually to fund vacations or whatever. (As an aside, I think one of the ways advertising really works is to create an impression that "all the happy pretty successful people do X" so we'll do X, too, kind of on autopilot. Humans, IMO, are very norm-driven, unless something kicks us out of the rut.)

A helpful thing, I suspect, when trying to get others out of autopilot mode (and maybe ourselves, as well), is to exploit the fact that many of us also like to feel like rebels or iconoclasts, or like we have insider information that other people don't have (the popular diets do this despite being talked about everywhere, which is kind of a fun trick). Some of the financial popularizers do a bit of this, I think: Dave Ramsey, Kiyosaki, some of the frugal investing advocates, etc.

On both diet and financial fronts (and I'm sure others), I think there are also simple facts that don't sink in unless someone really highlights them, that can provide a bit of a kick, too. It's easier to give examples on the financial front. Think about the number of people who thought they saved money (overall) when they had a mortgage, because they could deduct the interest on their income taxes and get a bigger refund. (The parts of the equation are separated in time, most people don't see the total dollar net all in one place at one time, etc.). Same effect in the appeal of cash-back credit cards, where you get 1% or 2% (under fine-print conditions) cash back but pay multi-percent interest if you don't pay off your balance. Another is the part of mortgage amortization where quite a number of smart people to whom I've spoken didn't seem to realize that there was a phase where for the price of a pizza or two a month, they could avoid hundreds to thousands of dollars of future interest expense and/or cut the effective loan period much faster than month for month.

Some of what's behind all of this is that most of us, going back to elementary school, are/were bad at "story problems" in the first place: I certainly heard peers whining about how we weren't ever going to have to figure out the closing distance between speeding trains in real life. Which is true . . . but adult life really is a huge series of story problems, on diverse topics, some of them really high stakes (investing, mortgage and other debt, calorie counting, drug/supplement side effects and benefits, behavioral health risks . . . .).

Heading off on another tangent, have you ever read "Portfolios of the Poor" (by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, Ruthven)? It's an analysis of year-long financial diaries of slum-dwellers world-wide who lived on <$2 a day, and their financial strategizing . . . which is often much more nuanced and suitable than strategies espoused by well-meaning "experts" who lack a clear understanding of the contingencies that surround their decision-making, and which falsely make it appear irrational or random to outside observers.

@CSARdiver , I think the above ramble is not really on-point to the specific question in your OP on this thread, but is consistent with the larger theme about marketing, misleading, conceptual traps, etc., that bear on many people's behavior (mine, certainly) related to both diet/fitness and personal finance.

** It's not my cognitive style either, really, but I'm also not usually sold by pure statistics, either, so I'm not pretending "special rationality" here, just quirky irrationality.

All very much appreciated.

I tailor to the audience, but miscalculated massively here on MFP.

My dad taught me compound interest through beer (well soda at first). That by saving a minimum 10% of your income and investing this your savings were working for you and this grew over time. This was reinforced by social interaction - do you spend your money at a bar or do you buy a six pack and drink this at home with friends? At first the savings amounts to little, but over time this equates to a free beer a month, then a six pack a month, etc.

I've been researching Dave Ramsey more than others as I hold the utmost respect for his 7th step - Once you acquire wealth - give generously. I reached out to his team and they have a training course I'm checking out. I see Kiyosaki in the same light, but more from a sense of him being a roadblock remover and box-shaker. He lives to upset systems of control.

Yes! I love Portfolios of the Poor. I previously read Nickel and Dimed, but found it incredibly biased and frankly insulting. Portfolios of the Poor was one of the studies which helped launch microtransaction banking endeavors in impoverished areas - finding a massive return on investment greater than that of established banks.

Again - I will incorporate several of these ideas - thank you!

Annie_01

I used to listen to Dave Ramsey on the car radio years ago in Nashville. I would drive my son to his tennis lessons and sit in the car and listen to him.

AnnPT77

CSARdiver wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Warning: Ill-focused ramble coming. Read at your own risk. :flowerforyou:

I feel like focusing on the term "deferred gratification" is not a good plan (even though I might've been first to use in the two threads, shorthand-wise, by bringing in the SME, which was kind of a red herring or red flag to a metaphorical bull, or something bull, anyway).

But I do think the tradeoff between long-term and short-term goals is a meaningful thing to consider. For one, looking at it that way is less offensive (i.e., doesn't so inherently set off the negative implications that @lynn_glenmont outlined so well).

Favoring the short-term (vivid) over the long term (distant/theoretical), and over-reacting to immediate circumstances rather than fully considering longer-term issues and trends: Those are things that humans tend to struggle with across a variety of domains, and it applies to personal finance across all income classes in one way or another.

Examples: People who get into the stock market when indexes are all high and frothy and everyone's talking about them, drop out of it disappointed at the inevitable trough, then (burned) take their remaining bucks into money market funds or savings accounts or put it under the mattress during the historically-predictable recovery that follows. People who don't want to "fail to enjoy life because uncle Joe died before retirement" (I exaggerate slightly), so take expensive vacations every year at the 'cost' of retirement savings (even matched 401k/403b/etc.!), without ever doing the math about maybe a really nice but not top-tier vacation, combined with a bit more retirement sock-away (with employer match). BTW: I'm not blue-skying about silly rich people here. I'm talking about actual people I actually know: Friends, co-workers, relatives, regular blue-collar and white-collar middle-income working people.

One of my co-workers even borrowed against his 403b to add rooms to his house (family size didn't change, they just wanted more room). He figured, as far as I could tell, that he'd have to keep working forever anyway because retirement was always a pipe dream, so he might as well have a comfy house to live in. This was a smart guy, good worker, but with a tendency toward conceptual myopia in some realms, one of which was (IMO) personal finance.

Same guy, BTW, would pretty much always take his roughly day-a-month sick time as it was earned (often on a Monday ) then sadly had to go on multi-week upaid leave when his newborn son tragically needed emergency surgery and extended ICU for a heart issue (we had good health bennies, fortunately, but he risked losing a month of that due to absences, if we hadn't made sure to keep him within the lines on that. (I was his immediate manager BTW.) (I'd add that we could accumulate sick time for literally our whole career if we didn't use it, plus we got a 50% payout for our balance up to some crazy-high number of hours (1100, maybe?) at retirement, at hourly equivalent of final salary. Despite taking a boatload of sick time off during that inconvenient cancer-treatment hobby I had that one year, I still got a nice check at separation.)

Health risks through poor nutrition or overeating or overdrinking (short of addiction, which is a different animal) fall into this present-desires-centric pattern.

I have no idea how to shift that thinking, even in myself. I'd observe that people are usually more influenced by vivid first-person stories/case-studies, and less influenced by evidence and statistics.

This may be counter to your personal cognitive style **, but take a look at popular magazines (I'm most familiar to those aimed at female homemakers, but it's not unique to them): They often start with a vivid case study (including a person's full name, even if "changed to protect privacy" , and include 'irrelevant' personal details about the person, to make them more relatable).

After setting up that story that the reader can empathize with and relate to - maybe just the "problem" part of the story - the articles start bringing in statistics/experts' quotes (personalizing the experts with names and personal details, often, too ), plus probably somewhere along the way some other relateable individuals' experiences (more names, direct quotes, details), then circle back to how the initial relateable person solved his/her problem in ways that illustrate and exploit the stats and experts' ideas (vivid specifics in the solution part, as well).

Stories!

I also would say that most people are torn in lots of directions, and modern life is very cognitively complex (too complex for even intelligent people to know basic things that it would be helpful for them to know, in all the realms they need to deal with). Therefore, many decisions people make are not really decisions at all, but rather simply the people doing things that they think are the normal, standard things to do in their circumstances, without really analyzing details (aside: these are conveyor belts, in the sense of my previous post on that point (maybe in the other thread? don't recall)). So, part of the issue is to somehow kick ourselves (or others) out of a default pattern, to turn the autopilot off and really learn about and think analytically about what we're doing.

So, if all of our friends are buzzing about going low carb to lose weight, and all those mags in the grocery line are blasting about the magic of keto, odds are really high that a lot of us will think that's the latest and best way to lose weight, and we'll set off looking for info about how to do it (which sources will reinforce its goodness and necessity), and we're off to the races. Odds of looking into alternatives to it are much lower.

(Since this is MFP, I'll note for other readers that I think low carb and keto are perfectly valid strategies for weight loss, literally necessary for some, helpful for some others. It just happens to be the thing that's on the tabloid covers lately. A while back, I think it was Paleo that was all trumpeted about, years back it was low fat, South Beach did a turn, I think volumetrics had a brief run, etc. It's always something that's hitting the most headlines; it isn't that the trumpeted methods are bad or wrong, just that they're not the exclusive magic the popularizers would have you think.)

Similarly, if your parents were hesitant to use debt to pay for consumables (vs. assets) or at all, you might be likely to do that by default. Otherwise, you might be heavily influenced by advertising of credit sources, and by knowing that your neighbors are ramping up debt annually to fund vacations or whatever. (As an aside, I think one of the ways advertising really works is to create an impression that "all the happy pretty successful people do X" so we'll do X, too, kind of on autopilot. Humans, IMO, are very norm-driven, unless something kicks us out of the rut.)

A helpful thing, I suspect, when trying to get others out of autopilot mode (and maybe ourselves, as well), is to exploit the fact that many of us also like to feel like rebels or iconoclasts, or like we have insider information that other people don't have (the popular diets do this despite being talked about everywhere, which is kind of a fun trick). Some of the financial popularizers do a bit of this, I think: Dave Ramsey, Kiyosaki, some of the frugal investing advocates, etc.

On both diet and financial fronts (and I'm sure others), I think there are also simple facts that don't sink in unless someone really highlights them, that can provide a bit of a kick, too. It's easier to give examples on the financial front. Think about the number of people who thought they saved money (overall) when they had a mortgage, because they could deduct the interest on their income taxes and get a bigger refund. (The parts of the equation are separated in time, most people don't see the total dollar net all in one place at one time, etc.). Same effect in the appeal of cash-back credit cards, where you get 1% or 2% (under fine-print conditions) cash back but pay multi-percent interest if you don't pay off your balance. Another is the part of mortgage amortization where quite a number of smart people to whom I've spoken didn't seem to realize that there was a phase where for the price of a pizza or two a month, they could avoid hundreds to thousands of dollars of future interest expense and/or cut the effective loan period much faster than month for month.

Some of what's behind all of this is that most of us, going back to elementary school, are/were bad at "story problems" in the first place: I certainly heard peers whining about how we weren't ever going to have to figure out the closing distance between speeding trains in real life. Which is true . . . but adult life really is a huge series of story problems, on diverse topics, some of them really high stakes (investing, mortgage and other debt, calorie counting, drug/supplement side effects and benefits, behavioral health risks . . . .).

Heading off on another tangent, have you ever read "Portfolios of the Poor" (by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, Ruthven)? It's an analysis of year-long financial diaries of slum-dwellers world-wide who lived on <$2 a day, and their financial strategizing . . . which is often much more nuanced and suitable than strategies espoused by well-meaning "experts" who lack a clear understanding of the contingencies that surround their decision-making, and which falsely make it appear irrational or random to outside observers.

@CSARdiver , I think the above ramble is not really on-point to the specific question in your OP on this thread, but is consistent with the larger theme about marketing, misleading, conceptual traps, etc., that bear on many people's behavior (mine, certainly) related to both diet/fitness and personal finance.

** It's not my cognitive style either, really, but I'm also not usually sold by pure statistics, either, so I'm not pretending "special rationality" here, just quirky irrationality.

All very much appreciated.

I tailor to the audience, but miscalculated massively here on MFP.

My dad taught me compound interest through beer (well soda at first). That by saving a minimum 10% of your income and investing this your savings were working for you and this grew over time. This was reinforced by social interaction - do you spend your money at a bar or do you buy a six pack and drink this at home with friends? At first the savings amounts to little, but over time this equates to a free beer a month, then a six pack a month, etc.

I've been researching Dave Ramsey more than others as I hold the utmost respect for his 7th step - Once you acquire wealth - give generously. I reached out to his team and they have a training course I'm checking out. I see Kiyosaki in the same light, but more from a sense of him being a roadblock remover and box-shaker. He lives to upset systems of control.

Yes! I love Portfolios of the Poor. I previously read Nickel and Dimed, but found it incredibly biased and frankly insulting. Portfolios of the Poor was one of the studies which helped launch microtransaction banking endeavors in impoverished areas - finding a massive return on investment greater than that of established banks.

Again - I will incorporate several of these ideas - thank you!

To be clear, I'm not criticizing Ramsey/Kiyosaki/FIRE advocates as to content (haven't studied any of them closely enough to consider that justifiable). I'm saying that their marketing includes some aspect of (exaggerating a tad here) "we teach the insider secrets so you can be a really cool insider/rebel/iconoclast, too". That kind of "sell" seems to work.