Dear Reader, What I am about to share with you may surprise you, but it will also offer you valuable insight. This piece comes from the lives of many high income people I have been associated with, have interviewed or read extensively about.
Would you like to be rich? So rich you can live in a palatial home with extensive gated grounds? Would you like to be so rich you can travel anywhere you choose and stay in the fanciest hotels?
Would you like to be so rich, you drive exotic cars, ride in limousines, fly on private jets and wear designer clothes? So rich, you become the envy of many other people who have far less money than you?
Would this be a dream come true for you?
If so, your dream could easily become a nightmare. If this dream came true, you would discover being rich is not what you think it is and you would discover you are not really rich at all in what matters.
Each day when you awake, you will have a huge financial burden that must be met, so you will focus your time, thoughts and energy on making money and often taking great risk to do it, rather than being free to go and play.
As you pursue making money, within your organization, you will have people secretly maneuvering around you trying to seize control of the company and put you out. And they will willingly attempt to destroy your reputation to do it.
Because of your high income, your tax bills will be gigantic, unless you put the money in off shore tax havens. But those tax havens often make it hard to bring your money back in.
Or you will spend heavily on politicians creating tax loopholes for you, an ugly business in any form. For those politicians always have their hands out looking for more money from people like you.
If your marriage ends, which is hurtful to anyone, you will come under attack from a collective of expensive attorneys seeking to grab as many of your assets as possible on behalf of your former spouse, and you will bear the cost of your own lawyers claiming they are protecting your assets. All those lawyers will demand you pay them a king’s ransom in fees.
Meanwhile, people around you will claim to be your friends but you have no way to know if they really are. That is unless your moneyed life falls apart and then you will painfully discover most of them were never really your friends, and hopefully none of them will have embezzled any of your money.
Because of your "deep pockets" you are readily the target of nuisance law suits in which litigants want you to pay them to go away, knowing it is time consuming and expensive for you to defend against their lawsuits. Still others envy what you have and insist you should "help out" with their financial problems.
And most of all, because you have so many possessions and much of the world has so little, like many other rich people, you will likely have bodyguards to protect you and your family from kidnapping or other harm. You will live your life always looking over your shoulder for possible threats.
If you would really like to be rich, here is a far better criterion in which to measure your wealth:
Do you have a family who loves you, respects you and values you? If yes, you already have something money can never buy, a harsh lesson many a billionaire has learned, especially as family fights have broken out over money.
If you are healthy, you have something billionaires and most of mankind desperately seek, especially as their health fails and death approaches.
If you have a sense of purpose, one that brings great meaning into your life, you have what many people wish for. If you are well read, contemplative, compassionate and generous, and you have a sense of inner peace, you have what we all strive for.
If you have a home, food in the refrigerator, some clothes in the closet and got up this morning, free to do with your life as you will, rather than being burdened by huge responsibilities and an overhead to match, you are the envy of many a billionaire.
If you have eyes that can see beautiful flowers in bloom, ears that can hear music that touches your heart, legs that can carry you anywhere you wish to go and arms that can hug others and a smile that can light up the world, you are indeed already rich beyond measure.
