I propose here a test to see how spoiled rotten you are, and I offer this mostly for Americans. My exposure to the everyday variety of citizens here in Texas is that the majority of them are spoiled almost beyond belief . . . and I'm one of them. I'm married to a spoiled rotten woman, and I have spoiled rotten kids and grandkids. None of us are rich or even what could be called "well off." Most Americans aren't either, but they're still spoiled. We're so badly spoiled that we're starting to stink up the place. Here's a test to determine your personal extent of rottenness.
1) How old and how expensive is the vehicle you drive? Do you have more than one vehicle? If you drive a new car (big payments) and have a second older car, you're rotten to the core, even if you can justify a need for two cars.
2) Do you live in a big house, say like 3,000 sq. ft. of living area? Do you have nice furnishings? If so, you're spoiled rotten, even if you can afford it.
3) Do you own at least three televisions or have more than one cell phone in the family? Do you spend extra money on jewelry, recreation, and sporting equipment? Do you have a budget for recreation? If so, you're spoiled rotten.
4) What would it take to get you to live less well, say for instance half as well? An act of God? If so, you're spoiled rotten.
This isn't part of the test, but if you had to live on far less money could you do it?
Look, we're all under pressure to spend money, and it comes at us from all angles. Anyone offering a service or good wants to sell it to you, and they work hard at it. You get family pressures to spend money, and again, from all angles. Everybody seems to need or want something, and those pressures aren't about to go away. No, they're here to stay, and you can't go away from the pressures either . . . at least not easily.
I have a budget only in my head because I spend as much as I need. Doing that makes life more of an obligation than a pleasure. I wonder what it feels like to have a decent savings account? I wonder what it feels like to have a safe supply of money left over at the end of the month? It's not a mystery to me; I just wonder why I allow it to happen to me. I don't have to do that. I'm a willing victim to all the demands for my money, and that's stupid.
During my quiet hours, usually late into the night, I amuse myself looking for ways to save money, to get out from under the money mandate. Last night I was checking our the housing market in San Felipe, Baja California. It's a town of about 30,000 only about a two hour drive into Mexico, and lots of Americans have discovered it. I started looking at San Felipe quite some time ago but wasn't much interested because I'm not a desert person. There are deserts, like the lovely desert around Tucson, and then there are butt ugly, desolate, bleak deserts, like the one around San Felipe. But there's lots of development there, quite a few homes for sale and at very reasonable prices. Forget the fancy resort towns of Mexico because that's not what you'll find in San Felipe. It's recreational, for sure, and the Sea of Cortez is really nice, lots of beautiful beaches. But then, there's that desert.
I found several houses there selling for under fifty grand, and they were nice smaller homes. Not fancy, but nice enough . . . if you can live in about a thousand to twelve hundred feet. I see a few small houses I could simply buy outright, which is the way to go. Just plunk down the money, and it's yours. So, I spend fifty grand on a place like that knowing my property taxes will be almost nil, that my utilities will be a fraction of what they cost here . . . and I'd still be in a gated community where HOA fees are like fifty bucks a month. Property and car insurance is less, and if I decide to keep using my medicare, American doctors and hospitals are not far away. And, my outgoing money demands suddenly drop by 75 percent. But, I'm still in that desert, so the question is: Just how spoiled rotten am I? I have a quick answer, which is: Not that much.
I could do a lot of things to a property under conditions like that. I'd have several thousand bucks a month left over, or maybe more. Even if I jumped in big, bought one of the nicer homes in that area, I'd still be far better off financially. But alas, I have a wife who has demands. Have you ever tried moving a woman from a really nice house to a lesser one? Or, try this statement on for size: "I'm buying a house in a bleak desert in Mexico, and we're going to live off less than two grand a month."
And then, make sure your earplugs are in place.
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