economics

How to be a millionaire on minimum wage

/ E Bishop Wooten / Leave a comment

With all the talk about “Fight for $15”, I did the math and crunched some numbers. I figure at 40 hours a week, we could all be millionaires if we just raise the minimum wage to $500 an hour.How about we just fight for $500?

Now if you want to kill the joke, just note that a million dollars a year wouldn’t make you a millionaire. Only a million dollars worth of assets would make you a millionaire (minus liabilities).

I once met a decent looking young man in a homeless shelter who once said that if he was offered a job making $35,000 a year, he would be homeless and save $35,000 a year.Wow! Just wow.Factor out transportation to get to work and taxes, you would be lucky to still have half of that.That and the fact that if you made that kind of money, you would be wanting a place of your own within a month.

If the Bible is right about the government serving Divine purposes, maybe taxes is God’s way of telling us to make sure our work serves a higher purpose than just making money for the sake of making money.

Also people that do get rich is usually because they can find every tax loopholes out there.So basically the secret to success is to always look for the loophole.

Maybe it is too late

/ E Bishop Wooten / Leave a comment

They say it is never too late to start again, or over. As optimistic as we try to make that sound, maybe it is too late. It is not that it is impossible because nothing is really impossible. It is just that as you get older, your values change. Life humbles you deeply as you age. You begin to realize that life is more than just achievements and consuming stuff.

When it comes to starting a family, it is not impossible to start one late in life. For health reasons, it may not be very wise. It may be hard to find a partner who is able to reproduce, and that is if you even are.

There are other options so all is not lost. Once you realize what is truly important in life, then you can redirect all of your interests toward serving that purpose.

For example, it might be too late to build a career as the older you get the more likely you are to be aged out since employers go for young talent. You can still use pursue your interests as a hobby. Again it is not impossible that that hobby could still turn into a career late in life. It’s just not guaranteed.

Nothing is promised in life. All we have is the present. Having goals keeps us alive but practicing mindfulness keeps us focused on the here and now. Just enjoy the journey and see where life takes you. We might even discover that life makes us rich in other ways that aren’t monetary.

The Right Way to go backwards

/ E Bishop Wooten / Leave a comment

Remember back in the 80’s and 90’s when you fell off your bike? You probably got back on it, despite the cuts and bruises. It’s what separates the men from the boys. It would probably be illegal by today’s standards to get back on after falling off.

The liberal agenda would want us to take our kids to the hospital. They might even tell them to apply for disability and that they wouldn’t be able to work for the rest of their life. Or that they have to take medicine forever.

As much as we try to believe in evolution and strive for progress, if you look close enough you realize that there is no such thing. We have basically been doing the same thing for centuries, only in different ways. Technology makes it easier, which often makes us lazier.

Maybe in a sense, we are not really progressing as much as we are regressing; aka progressively going back to where we started.

The irony of progressing right back where you started. Maybe we will go back to a time when people weren’t so sensitive and materialistic.

Party like it’s 1899.

Everything is meaningless: And that’s okay

/ E Bishop Wooten / Leave a comment

Ecclesiastes 1:1. . .”Meaningless, meaningless. All is meaningless.”

My favorite verse in the Bible. I also like the Geneva Bible, which predated King James. Everything after that just gets more watered down. Solomon, the wisest man in the Old Testament, wrote the most doom and gloom book that you would think he struggled with depression.

The first and last verse of Ecclesiastes pretty much say it all. But in between, the author sums up how everything under the soon is meaningless and there is nothing really new. And that was 3,000 years ago. I think it was GK Chesterton who said there was no such as progress. Underneath all the change, we are still the same people and everything is basically the same, just with a different style.

There is nothing wrong with pursuing material gain; as long as we don’t make it our identity. Everything we gain in this life will die with us, except for our faith and the good deeds we do to serve our neighbor.

Solomon goes on to say that since everything is vanity, the best we can do is find satisfaction in our work; amazingly the the vanity of everything and the enjoyment of it both come from God.

Many people will give up when they realize that life is ultimately meaningless. But the wise ones will feel a sense of freedom. That just means there is no sense of expectation that society tries to place on you. There is no need to try and “keep up” with everyone else.

Do whatever makes you happy as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else or hinder your relationship with the Divine.