There are financial pitfalls aplenty for career-building millennials--be it shoddy planning, outrageous debt, or credit card quandaries. At only 23, Zac Bissonnette has staked his young authoring career on untying his generation’s financial tangles: His second book, How To Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents, is out now (you can check out an excerpt here). Fast Company talked with the precocious author about financial freedom, Benjamin Franklin, and making good decisions automatic.
FAST COMPANY: To begin, are you richer, smarter, and better looking than your parents?
ZAC BISSONNETTE: I would say richer, yeah; smarter, no; better looking, maybe. You have to handicap it because my parents are 63. I would say we're even. That title I took from, there's an old Yiddish proverb, that with money in your pocket, you're handsome and wise, and you sing well too. The idea behind that is that if you have the money, if you're on top of the money thing, your life--everything else--is better. So that's really what that title's from, not so much a narcissistic comment.
Like Kanye West says, "Having money's not everything/Not having it is."
I think versions of that have been around long before Kanye West. It's absolutely true. Income only really affects happiness, in terms of differences in levels of income in lower levels of income. Someone who's earning $300,000 dollars a year is not really much happier than someone who's earning $200,000 a year. Someone who's earning $60,000 a year is a lot happier than someone who's earning $30,000 a year. The benefit of money is that is it can help you relax a little bit if you're on top of it, but other than that, it doesn't have some magic ability to make you happier.
What are some of the key elements of establishing financial stability?
The biggest one is getting out of debt--kind of a cliché, but it's really, really true. People that don't have debt are happier than people that have debt across t...
[Source: Fast Company]
No comments:
Post a Comment