How important is money? No matter how much others try to downplay it by saying that money isn’t everything, money is an extremely essential part of life. It buys you options, freedom, and security in ways that other things just can’t buy. Money will heavily influence your life.
When I was living on an after tax poverty income of $20 – $25,000, I was miserable. I am living on an after tax income of between $75 – $80,000 now and I can tell you that it feels much better. There is a lot more breathing room in my budget on a month to month basis. I don’t feel the struggle anymore.
Anything that I want to buy, I can buy now. That’s the key when it comes to money. It’s to get to a point where you can afford anything. However, you don’t have to buy everything that you want. That’s the beauty of it. Once you get to that spot, what it means is that you now have options and choices.
When I was living with poverty income, I had no choices. It was either provide value to my company or risk getting fired and can’t even put food on the table. Whether we like it or not, money gives us choices. We can’t walk away from a job at the snap of our fingers if we don’t have enough of it.
Although I believe there are more important things to focus on in life, money is also an important aspect of our lives that we can’t overlook. Trust me when I say that I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is mountains better than to be poor. When I was poor, I can honestly admit that I was extremely miserable.
How Important is Money?
The short and sweet answer is very and extremely. They say it can’t buy happiness but I’m not so sure about that. Happiness may be an internal feeling but it is heavily influenced by our environment and outside factors as well.
While we don’t need to have next generational level of wealth like Jeff Bezos, we do need a baseline amount to keep food on the table and have running water. Otherwise, we can’t meet our basic level of need from the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
We can’t even pursue our number one goal of self actualization if our physiological needs of food, water, warmth, and rest aren’t met. Your hierarchy of needs is a building block of items. When you skip over the building block to the next level, there will be problems.
It will be impossible to achieve your goals if you haven’t been properly fed or sleeping. For better or for worse, money easily solves the first building block of your needs. That’s how important money is. It allows you to get to the next step of your goals. Without it, it will be impossible.
Why is Money Important?
So now that we know how important is money, now let’s get into the reasons why it is important. One reason it is essential is so that you could UTTERLY DESTROY that social share button and post to your favorite social media channel! Your friends might have been brainwashed by other people who downplay its importance.
Therefore, let’s get your friends into the side of light and inform them that it’s not wrong or bad to pursue and want it. I know that I’m not ashamed to admit that I love pursuing it. Let’s all spread the right kind of information out there so that all the wrong information can be corrected.
Help your friends out by doing a free thing like sharing an article. So with that said, let’s go into the reasons why it is important!
1) It May Prevent Suicide
Approximately 75% of all suicides occur in low and middle income countries. Is it a correlation and not causation? Sure. However, doesn’t it seem weird that that correlation would exist in the first place? There are other variables that could contribute to the statistic, absolutely.
It could have been home life or it could have been unsafe conditions that are causing psychological distress to lead to that. However, if one correlative variable can help prevent suicide, why discount it? When you’re asking how important is money, it’s so important that it may just help prevent suicide.
When I struggled, I can attest that it felt horrible and awful. Everyday felt like a battle. I wasn’t living life, I was just existing. Life is meant to be enjoyed with down feelings here and there. It is not meant to have majority down feelings with enjoyments here and there.
Therefore, don’t discount its importance in your life. It’s much more influential than society gives it credit for.
2) Money Buys You Freedom
Another great benefit to having money is that it buys you freedom. Freedom is something that is priceless. There’s no supermarket you can go to that sells freedom. However, once you have a lot of disposable income and savings by your side, there’s no one who controls you.
Your landlord wants rent? Sure no problem. The restaurant wants payment? No problem at all. Your friend who you don’t like wants to hang out with you? Pass. That’s how important money is. It buys you freedom so that you don’t have to do the things that you don’t want to do and you only have to do the things that you want to do.
It would be completely up to you if you want to continue working or not. The worst that your employer can do to you is fire you. However, when you already have a large safety nest egg, would you really care? My guess is that you wouldn’t. The freedom to spend your time the way you want to spend it is powerful.
No one will be looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re doing the “right things”.
3) You Become More Generous
When you have a lot of surplus for yourself, then you become much more generous. Billionaires donate and give away billions of dollars to charity. The only reason they do is because they are able to. For ordinary folks like you or I, we don’t have the means to do so. We have to figure out if we can afford to in the first place.
However, when there is an excess amount, then you can afford to give away to make society better. If not in terms of money, then you donate canned goods, clothes, or anything else that could help someone else in need. That’s how important money is. It makes you much more happier to give away things.
When you are struggling with no excess, not only are you reluctant to give stuff away, it just might be literally impossible to do so. There are essential things that you have to pay for like food, water, and rent that has to be paid for first. Like the popular saying, you can’t help someone else without helping yourself first.
That is why it is so important.
4) You Have More Options
How important is money? Well, when you have a lot of it, you can make choices for yourself without taking anything or anyone else into consideration. You suddenly find out that you don’t want to go into work? Just call in and quit. You suddenly have a massive craving for some cheese fries? Well, order some.
There are little to no constraints once you amass a small fortune. We live on constraints and limits every single day. We are limited by our income that we bring in where a large chunk of that has to go to investment accounts anyway. That’s what money can give you.
It can give you more options than you ever thought was possible. These days, if the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t happening, I would visit my home country, South Korea. The street food in South Korea is absolutely amazing and I can’t wait to visit again sometime. However, right now, I physically can’t.
I am beholden to the limited amount of vacation days that I receive. However, wouldn’t that be the life if I could travel internationally whenever I want? One can only dream. One day, it will be reality.
5) It is More Expensive to be Poor
There’s well documented reasons why it is more expensive to be poor. The poor has to seek out opportunities while the opportunities seek out the rich. Simple things like getting groceries is just more expensive for the poor than it is for the rich. Public transportation can only take you so far.
When you have a lot of money, more people want to hang out with you. In turn, it becomes much easier to make more of it. That’s how important money is. The more you have, the easier life becomes because people start to pave the way for you. You don’t pave the way for others.
The decision to cater to the wealthy is nothing personal, by the way. It is a pure business decision to do so and you can’t blame others for acting in such a way. Therefore, try to acquire as much of it as you can. For some reason, life will become much more easier.
When you don’t need or want anything from people is when people start to give you more things. Funny how it works out in such a way.
6) You Get to be Authentic
When you don’t need others, you get to be your authentic self. You don’t have to spend time with people you don’t like or respect. You can simply avoid them. Why? Because you don’t need them. Whether they drop you makes zero difference in who you are as a person.
That’s how important money is. It lets you bring your full authentic self and carry it across with you to everyone else. You are not beholden to anyone or anything else. This doesn’t mean be rude, but this means that you don’t have to laugh a fake laugh when your boss makes a joke.
It means you don’t have to smile and be cheerful when that coworker you don’t like walks into the room. You can simply just be what you’re feeling without having to explain yourself to anybody else. There’s no need to put on different masks to different people. You can speak freely without any regard for the consequences.
Authenticity is one of the best benefits of not needing anyone or anything else.
Don’t Listen to Others Who Say Money is Evil
We are taught from an impressionable young age that money is the root of all evil. That couldn’t be further from the truth. When we are young is when we are the most prone to emotional messages. It’s when emotions make much more impact to us than when we are old.
When we are old, our ability to empathize and care diminishes slowly but surely. However, when we are young is when we are just about to figure out who we are as a person. When emotions run high. This continues until we are in our late 20’s. Therefore, when others talk about how money is the root of all evil, we start to believe this lie.
I know I certainly did. The ones who bashes on the rich are usually the ones who aren’t rich themselves. They want to blame someone else. They can’t imagine that if they couldn’t become rich and successful themselves, how could others do it? Others must have done it through greedy and unethical means.
That’s the poor mindset that will perpetuate until the rest of eternity. Don’t get sucked into this mentality. It’s not healthy. If others criticize you for being “cheap,” they will be asking you how you became rich decades later.
If you want to be like the top 1%, you have to do what the top 1% does. You can’t do or follow the mindset of what the rest of the 99% does. It’s not hard to get into the top 1%. It turns out, not many people are wiling to put in the work to get there anyway.
That’s great news for you where you can seize on the opportunities like a vulture.
How Important is Money? It’s a Necessary Part of Life
Money is something you’ll always need in your life. It makes the world run and keeps everything intact. It was created to solve the timing differences between supply and demand. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. If you still don’t believe just how essential it is, try to live on a poor person’s income.
It’s not pleasant by any means. Every paycheck, I felt powerless. Like someone or something else controlled me and my sole living purpose was to work just to exist and service their needs. You want to be free. You want to be your own person. Money is a way to keep score. It’s a way that you can see whether you are winning or not.
It’s important in that sense and in that regard. Things like health, family, time, and freedom are far more important. However, that doesn’t mean that money is never or not essential.
There are articles that say “money won’t solve all your problems” so you shouldn’t chase after it. That’s true, it’s not going to solve all of your problems. However, it will solve a vast majority of your problems. I would argue that it can solve 80% of the building blocks of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The only thing it can’t solve is genuine intimate relationship and friends. However, what is wrong with solving 80% of your problems? That’s better than having 100% of your problems in the first place. If you haven’t already, start your money journey today and compare it to the life when you didn’t have a lot of dollars in the bank.
There’s a very good chance that you will be much more fulfilled when you are rich than when you are poor.
