Wealth is extra of what you need and plenty of what you want. It's connotation is safety from harm and distance from turmoil. Wealth does not alleviate stress but the bearer encounters the kind of stress everyone longs to have. The stress of opportunity.
Opportunity is stress. It tests our capacity to foresee events in the future. Wealth is never static, it has a life on it's own. Your wealth is either growing or dying. It can be threatened by ill health or attack. It needs to be fed and tended to lest it develop in a way contrary to our values.
If you are good at forecasting events to come, you can easily invest your wealth in avenues that accelerate it's reproduction. That is, if you understand the life cycle of money and it's mating seasons. Building wealth is like owning a ranch. You put a fertile cow in with your bull and hope things happen in a way were you will turn two head in to three. Working for your money is like buying meat at a grocery store, you will NEVER get to real wealth, real extra expendable income, through making wealth for someone else.
To be clear, there is rich and semi rich in every country. In some of the poorest regions on Earth wealth has a different meaning than it does here. The majority reason for that is that we are limited by our dedication and capacity in our economy and do not have any political impediments limiting the amount of money you can own. Values like health, well being, and spiritual serenity are requirements to be considered wealthy here and are all but unknown to some third world countries. In Bangladesh for instance during the monsoon season over one half of the population lives in flooded houses. With water up to their wastes they struggle to keep healthy since the water surrounding them is full of raw sewage. They live this way for over a month. That would be impossible here, even unthinkable that a standard so low could be considered living.
How does semi rich compare to really being rich? Semi rich is visually recognized. Big houses meant to be seen with fancy cars in the driveway and lots of parties and social events show casing the life style of the semi rich. Semi rich people donate money to groups, organizations or causes that they support or want to be seen supporting. They want to make sure everyone they come across knows of their success in life.
Real rich people are different. They have mansions that are not accessible to the common person. Their hired help has been vetted to make sure they are discrete and ethical. They are driven in the finest of cars but no one ever sees them getting in or out of them. They don't donate money to a cause they own a foundation. These foundations are mentioned before shows on public television. They do NOT want you to know they're rich. Not just because they don't want to be pestered by you asking for a loan, but because you don't know the etiquette in communicating with them and they feel like you are "the people of Wal-Mart". While a regular person might buy stock in a corporation for their own reasons, rich people are on the boards of those companies and get paid dividends from the stock they own. They play a part in directing the company. While we guess where the ship is going and how fast it will get there, they plot the course and set the speed.
Really rich people aren't less stressed than the poor but they are stressed in different ways. The rich stress about monetary trends while the poor stress out in desperation. Stress is caused by expectation. The expectation of an owner accepting your bid on an apartment on fifth avenue has the same power as the stress of the sheriff evicting you from your apartment. The difference is the consequence but it's the expectation that powers the feeling of dread.
For instance, if you've been poor your whole life and you've been evicted out of every apartment you've lived in because your Mom is an addict and she cant bring herself to pay the rent instead of shooting her food stamps in her arm, you already know what churches will help out with food and lodging and your needs. If you've had a catastrophe in your life and this is the first time you've been evicted it can make you suicidal. You can be stressed to the point of not having hope. Expectation is the common quality of stress, and the rich know they can lose enough money to expect their life will change for the worse and that is stress none the less.
So far we've covered that you'll never get rich by making someone else rich. We've discussed the principle of rich verses semi rich and we've touched on ranching our dollars. Obviously it's not that simple. If you're from the big city you cant be blamed if you think you just put to animals together and "wallah" you've got three animals and the new one comes out wrapped in butcher paper.
Problem is, that calf wont always fetch the same amount of dollars every time and the variables that lend to what buyers are willing to pay for it changes for many different reasons.
The real quest for wealth as it pertains to extra expendable monies is the quest to understand the seasons and weather it faces. It relies on understanding what causes a man to bid one hundred dollars today for your calf, and next week he will be willing to bid three hundred. Experience leads to foresight, it leads to predictions and if they're right the product is profit. Profit is power. It is the power to make more profit. Someone always has the power of setting the stage for greater profit and unseating the masters of prediction seldom ever happens. That is why the semi rich want to be really rich and the rich want to tend to their investments daily. Once one has wealth but no power one loses the greatest portions of his wealth.
