Get-Rich-Quick Mentality Leads to Poverty

For those of you new to Free Money Finance, I post on The Bible and Money every Sunday. Here's why.

Here's an interesting verse I ran into the other day:

Greedy people try to get rich quick but don’t realize they’re headed for poverty. Proverbs 28:22 (New Living Translation)

IMO, the Bible couldn't be more spot on. A few examples:

1. The millions of people who think they will get rich quick buy buying lottery tickets. They spend years and years (even decades!) spending money on the chance they will hit it big. In reality, all the money they are spending to "hit it bog" is driving them into the poorhouse (or, more common, farther into the poorhouse.)

2. The millions of people who join network marketing organizations each year, buy a ton of over-priced products, then expect riches to be on their way. They expect wealth will be both easy and quick -- and it is neither. Instead, they spend more and more money buying expensive products they will never use and often digging themselves a tough financial hole.

3. The millions (I'd guess) of people who got into house flipping (a few years back). Think most of them got rich quick or most of them took a beating. I'd guess the latter...

You probably have some more examples (maybe even better ones). If so, leave them below.

Now I'm not saying that no one gets rich doing what I have listed above. Obviously, some people do win the lottery, make it big in network marketing, and made a fortune flipping houses. But did the vast majority get rich quickly or did they lose money? I think we all know the answer.

The path to true wealth requires one thing that the ideas above lack: time. Yep, the way to become wealthy for most people isn't in an instant -- it's slowly and surely over many, many years. The truth is:

Wealth from get-rich-quick schemes quickly disappears; wealth from hard work grows over time. Proverbs 13:11

:-)

Comments

[DIY Investor]

In 1848 tens of thousands, if not more, headed to California to find gold. Many died along the way, many ended up broke, few made anything out of it. Goldrushes appear over and over in many different guises. The attempts to get wealthy with little work and quickly will always be with us.

[Stephanie Taylor Christensen]

I think the same mentality even extends further into debt resolution. People who use debt consolidation fail to remain debt-free 70% of the time. Why? Their "I want it and I want it now" behavior remains,and they just charge their way right back into the same financial mess they tried to clean up.

[Grant]

I realized my father had given me advice when I was a teenager and I hadn't picked up on it until I was 24 or 25 (sadly). He didn't give me this advice out loud; he gave it to me via his actions. When I was in my teenage years (13-19), my father was in kind of dead end in his career. A job in accounting which had seemed lucrative when I was a child had stagnated. He had spent years living frugally with my mother and raising me and my two older sisters, but had little money for retirement and was still only halfway through a 30 year mortgage. There was no money to send me to college either, and I knew that bothered him. He had played the lottery for many years, one or two tickets every drawing- hoping that would solve the worries that kept him up at night.

I don't know what the catalyst was, but he suddenly decided to go back to school (over 20 years after getting his first bachelors) and to become a CPA. It took a few years while working full time to get the second degree and the certification. Now he is nearing retirement, makes well over twice what he made at that time, and will not have to worry about retirement anymore. As a result, my mother who had health problems a few years ago was able to retire early.

He has not bought a lotto ticket in at least 10 years. Again, too bad it took me so many years to get the lesson there.

[MattJ]

DIY Investor:

The 49ers travelled great distances, hiked up into the mountains to live alone or in very rough-and-tumble mining camps, they worked in the wilderness and put up with the elements, enduring the very difficult work of mining the land with primitive tools. I would not describe the 49ers as motivated "to get wealthy with little work".

49ers from some other countries (China, for example) were even more limited in that they weren't allowed to work a claim until after it had been abandoned by locals.

Whatever else one might say about them, they weren't trying to avoid work.

[Mike - Saving Money Today]

Hi FMF,

Another example of the Get-Rich-Quick mentality is the “make money online” crowd. I see tons of people trolling forums and blogs looking for some magical formula that will let them make boatloads of cash without doing any real work. These people are just suckers for the snake-oil salesmen waiting to take advantage of them. The saps buy one “Instant Cash!” product after another and just dig themselves deeper and deeper into the hole. The truth is there is no secret formula other than hard work. But that’s not the answer people want to hear.