I agree that having money is a matter of luck.
And if you’ve had sufficient luck in that arena, it makes your management of money skills less relevant. If you have a Michael Jordan-esque income, you can afford to simply buy something you see and like without considering your monthly budget, knowing that, ultimately, you WILL have the ability to pay off the charge. And without running off into a further hijack of whether Jordan’s athletic ability itself is luck, I am content to characterize his wealth as luck for the purposes of this debate.
But I still say that in the final analysis, having poor credit is seldom “bad luck”. It’s lacking the skill to manage finances, buying things without having a clear picture of how they’ll be paid for.
Of course an inheritance is luck - both good and bad, in that you lost a presumably loved relative, and good in that you got some cash. But some people piss an inheritance away, and others take it, invest it, plan for contingencies, and always leave themselves a comfortable cushion.
My neighbors have a new car every two years. I drove my last car for six years, and the one before that for ten years, because I didn’t want to overextend myself. Could I have bought a new car every two years? Sure. But I chose to keep the old cars, and save what would have been my car payments every month towards a new car.
Yet when I did buy a new vehicle, and paid cash, my neighbors were over looking at it, and mentioned how lucky it was that I could buy a car with cash.
It’s not luck.
- Rick