[throw0101a]

> 90% of money problems seem to come from a few things: * Expensive cars - bought with debt. * Expensive housing - again bought with debt. * Expensive schooling - even more debt.

Nick Maggiulli made a good observation in a 2020 weblog post:

> All the expense tracking and goal setting in the world cannot make up for an insufficient balance.

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...

The bottom 40-50% of US households can either barely or not-at-all cover the basic necessities: housing, food, transportation, healthcare. Note that this doesn’t include any money for education, clothing, or any form of entertainment.

> That’s why the biggest lie in personal finance is that you can be rich if you just cut your spending. And the financial media feeds this lie by telling you to stop spending $5 a day on coffee so that you can become a millionaire.

[…]

> Instead of trying to convince everyone that they can be rich, we should be trying to convince everyone that they can be not poor. Now that would be a start to undoing the biggest lie in personal finance.