Money Listens

My daughter came home from school with a list of non-fiction books. She had to choose one for a paper. Guess which one she picked? (Remember that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.) Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John De Graaf (Author), David Wann (Author), Thomas H. Naylor (Author).

Affluenza is a clever combination of the words affluence and flu. The authors’ definition is “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” The symptoms of affluenza include communities where people don’t know each other; houses with televisions for every member of the family; and people who, on the surface, have it all but feel depressed and empty. You don’t need medical training to diagnose affluenza, and the statistics are staggering: The average American spends more than $21,000 a year on consumer goods. To emphasize their point, the authors note that each week Americans spend six hours shopping and only 40 minutes playing with their children. And the six hours shopping sounds way too low to me. Of course, I live less than an hour from a 300 store outlet mall.

What really worries me about affluenza is the contagious part. Keeping up with the Jones’ has replaced baseball as American’s pastime. We can recite car models, plasma screen pixels, and designer labels as we once talked about batting averages and home runs. We can’t be content with a Toyota. It has to be the “luxury” vehicle with the LS or the GS attached. It isn’t about transportation, is it? It’s about status. We have no idea what we actually “need.” It’s all about “want.” We’re nauseous when the credit card bill arrives, or when we see how little we have in our retirement fund. But the pain is self-inflicted. We choose to spend money we don’t have. We choose to buy a new car when we could put that money into our IRA. We choose to ignore how much we spend eating out. The good news is there’s a cure for affluenza. And it’s simple. Buy only what you need. That means what is urgent and necessary. And buy the least expensive minimum that will get the job done. Save the rest of your money. Do these two things and you’ll feel better in the morning.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Spending Less and Less. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.