Alrighty so I know this is the most boring topic to most people, but I really believe that to engage in effective activism and start to deconstruct the ideology around hyper-consumption you gotta learn a bit about finance. Yeah I know it’s a field dominated by the worst boys you’ll ever meet, in their lil Sperrys, but hear me out.
Someone’s profiting off of your lack of financial education.
Finances, taxes, and all that was never taught in my school, and I hear that’s a common story. In fact, most of the advice I was given financially was the exact opposite of how people actually get rich. Hustle harder, grind grind, grind. Consume consume consume. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Blah blah blaaaaahh.
That’s some BS, anyone with any real wealth built it through investments, not work. There’s this saying – “make your money make money” – that’s pretty much the opposite of hustling for money. The goal of the 1% is really to sit back and do as little as possible while the money they invest appreciates.
And money doesn’t just magically appreciate, that return on investment is often either skimmed off of someone else’s labor or propped up by the government who literally considers ‘stocks’ and ‘the economy’ to be about the same, nevermind that the working class’s economic stability has little to do with stocks. (And not to be a conspiracy theorist, but the most common misinformation I hear the working class get told about economics? Is exactly the sort of misinfo that allows the owning class to extract maximum profit off us. It feels like the lack of financial education us Americans get is, whether through deliberate means or negligence, greatly benefiting corporations at great cost to us)
So I’m gonna try and debunk some of the biggest myths I hear around economics…
Myth – Hustle and you’ll get rich!
Yep, this infuriating one. If you’re working for someone else, any more hustling you do isn’t getting you rich, it’s getting THEM rich. Funny how we’re taught hard work is a virtue though.
The only time that hustling pays off at all is if you own your own business. (And I’m not talking about selling on Amazon or driving Uber here – those are designed to extract profit for Amazon and Uber and the only reason they say you’re ‘your own boss’ is to get around the laws around giving employees rights. You ain’t your own boss with gig work, you ain’t even an employee with rights.)
And even if you fully start your own business? The #1 advice I get from CEOs and founders I’ve talked to is that to lead, you need to learn to delegate. Even for skills you have yourself. Someone else does the work (for a wage lower than the value of their work) and you profit. That isn’t a spicy take in entrepreneurship, that is the entire underlying business model of a corporation.
And even having someone else do the work? Try to have them do the minimum viable amount of work, the more time they spend on it, the less profit is left over after paying them.
Myth – [Consumer Good] is an investment!
This one’s a personal pet peeve, I feel like working class people are often told that a nice car is an investment, a nice set of furniture is an investment, a nice set of clothes is an investment.
Bull. Shit. Only one thing is a reasonable investment, and it is a thing that increases (appreciates) in value at a rate higher than inflation. Anything else is a depreciating asset. The fucking opposite.
What if that purchase is used for your business to make you more money? Nope, still a depreciating asset. This one can at least be considered a business expense, which lets a business owner write it off taxes. But the ONLY thing that is an investment is something that is reasonably expected to provide a return on interest that is higher than inflation.
So why are we told that depreciating assets like cars, designer clothes, etc are investments? Well, technically it is someone’s investment. Not yours though, you’re the pay pig there. When we put money down for these consumer goods – say, getting the newest car on loan or putting a purse on credit – The interest you pay on your loan ends up in the pockets of whoever gave you that loan.
The only things I would buy as investments are: Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate, Commodities, etc. And just to show you how crazy the amount you can make investing is? Here’s a 50 year projection for what happens (assuming average ROI) if you buy $25 a month in S&P 500. Over that time, you put in $15,000 and make $418,109. So in that graph? The tiny blue bars are the money you spent and the big orange section is the money you make with interest. (I hate to say this but the ‘stop buying coffee to get rich’ dipshits were almost right – they just forgot to add ‘start buying stocks with that extra $25’)
And remember, that money you make only gets made if you pick investments which actually appreciate! So no fuckin designer goods or cars or whatever.
Myth – Invest in (This one thing!)
Invest in a exciting company! In Bitcoin! In whatever the hot new thing is. No, that’s probably a pump and dump. if someone tells you to invest in any one singular thing, you’re probably getting conned. The con is – someone buys up stock or assets, artificially drives the price up by convincing others to buy it to get rich quick, and sells their own holdings. Then whoever bought in is left with some worthless shit.
If you’re gonna invest, invest broadly. (It’s called diversifying assets) For stocks – I’d recommend mutual funds with hundreds of different company stocks in there. Maybe one mutual fund with American companies, one with non American companies. So when America does its usual bullshit, you won’t be screwed.
(I could go on about picking funds – it’s a balance between high risk high reward, and low risk low reward. I personally like lower risks) The S&P 500 is one of the lowest risk funds IMO, they’ve got a average ROI of 10% compared to the average inflation rate of 3%
Myth – Consumerism / Money is Apolitical!
This one’s a big one – the belief that your consumerism isn’t deeply linked to national or global politics. Well, to oversimplify a rather complex and purposely obtuse chain of events, when you buy something from an American corporation, they make a profit, turn around and lobby politicians with that money, and often have far more influence than your singular vote has. So the saying “vote with your dollar” IMO isn’t about consumerism – it’s about looking up who specifically heads the companies you shop at, and which politicians they’re paying off for what reasons. (Of course, this is a LOT of research, so an easier way to ‘opt out’ is to shop at local small businesses rather than Amazon / Walmart / Etc)
I’d say consumerism and strategic finance is the most politically active thing we can do, perhaps even more than voting.
Also, and this is a big enough topic to make a whole post about, but through buying stocks, a person becomes a owner of a small fraction of a company (Literally, having a stock in the company). And companies are legally answerable to stock holders. So in the same way the 1% uses stock ownership to wield power over corporations for their benefit? So can activist investors, groups who buy stock together to force changes at those corporations. (Side note but Exxon is currently suing activist investors who are trying to get the shareholder meeting to include climate proposals – and if there’s one way to know that you’re successfully putting pressure on the powerful? It’s when the lawyers come out.)
Enough theory, what can we do?
Here’s my short list of ideas, I could go on and on about effective financial activism tho.
Don’t buy shit on credit / loans if you can help it. You’re being scalped for someone else’s profit.
Don’t rent anything if you can help it, you’re REALLY being scalped for someone else’s profit. Even more than if you took out a loan to eventually own it in full.
Sometimes you’ll have to do one or the other (i.e. housing.) It’s better to take out a loan where you’ll pay a percentage in interest for someone else and build some equity for yourself than pay rent where you’ll pay 100% to build someone else’s equity
Don’t let folks convince you there’s shame in looking poor. The US has a culture of making working class folks poor and indebted by making us scared of looking poor.
Don’t buy luxury, luxury shit is wealth cosplay sold to the working class to extract money from us. (seriously the richest folks I know dress like ass)
Do invest if you have any extra cash, tho that’s not always possible.
Do look at the expenses you have with a budgeting software, break it down by category, and try reducing the biggest first. Get creative with self sufficiency, even for things we’re trained to rely on corporations for, see if you can get the same goods yourself. (Collect & purify rainwater, grow food, barter with your neighbors)
Do donate to mutual aid groups if you can. Food not bombs is one of my favorites!
All this shit and more (I could go onnn about any of it) keeps your money out of the hands of folks who’ll use it to lobby politicians to fuck you over, and in your own hands where you can use it to help people in your community. (This whole idea of counter-growth. IMO we don’t need revolution – we need to start building networks of support and power that work counter to the ones which don’t serve us)
