Are you dancing with the IBIZA set??

This is a exert from my up and coming Beer Coaster Guide to Finance. The guide is all about finance in the 21st century, lot of good stuff in there to get people thinking about saving and investing.

There’s a coastal town in Spain called Ibiza where the English go to get ‘smashed’, tan up on the beach and spend pounds to put on pounds. It’s a place with no inhibitions no rules, where money runs down the drain in a swirling party atmosphere. Parallels can be drawn between this Ibiza and a condition here also termed Ibiza – I have a Big Income but Zero Assets. If you are dancing with the IBIZA set, your prospects of building wealth will be severely affected. Party goers in this subset don’t place any emphasis on investing. Stereotypically they earn a good income, commonly from the huge fly in/fly out mining industry currently fuelling our economy. They’re locked up for weeks in ‘dongas’ in hot, harsh conditions and when they fly home they ‘HIT IT’ - living an excessive lifestyle, eating out most nights, buying new cars and going on exotic holidays.
Well you might say, “It doesn’t sound all that bad”, they’re having a hell of a time within the game of Tick Tock, but the one thing they are missing , if they don’t wake up and save and invest for the future, when the party is over, the IBIZA set will suffer the inevitable ‘hang over’.
Their Superannuation will fall well short of their requirements when they retire and in our world there are only two ways to generate income – exchanging your labour and skills for dollars and saving and creating wealth that in turn provides passive income. Once you stop working, you can no longer exchange your labour for income and if you haven’t invested, there will be no income from passive alternatives.
If you are dancing with the IBIZA set, all your income at the moment is generated by selling your skills on the labour market. But that is only the first stage of your financial journey through life. The next stage in this personal financial journey is about transitioning the source of your income, so that you use less of your own fading work hours to generate income as you age. Drive along the roads and have a look at the numbers of grey haired men, bent over repairing the road or rail line. They must be in their 50’s and some 60’s but they’re still toiling away, why is that? They never began their journey to growth their wealth tree.
We all like a party but what keeps the IBIZA set dancing into oblivion? The root cause seems to be the mental attitude we have mentioned in the 5 barriers to financial success. There’s fear, lethargy, ignorance, procrastination to name a few – the ‘live in the moment’ mentality perpetuates the continuing failure of any semblance of saving and investing.. That leads to a feeling of resignation and this is compensated by lifestyle spending.
There is always hope for the IBIZA set. With a good income, their situation can quickly turn around but they must acknowledge their predicament and make efforts to change the situation. Everyone has a chance to have a goose that lays a golden egg. If that goose is eaten or neglected, these golden eggs disappear fore ever.
Is it time to put down your glasses…?