Money isn't everything (but it buys just about everything)

By David Bradshaw


 



Which is more important—money or relationships? Or does it really matter, when, if you put your mind to it, you can have both?

MOST people accept that if you want your life to improve you have to set goals.

At this point a lot of people confess that they’ve no idea what goals to set.

That isn’t a problem.

All you have to do is think of what you want, which can be divided, for most of us, into money and relationships. Money, as long as there’s enough of the stuff, can be translated into virtually everything material: a car, a house, foreign travel—whatever you want. 

Relationships are one important area of life where money is said to be of no relevance.

But don’t you believe it. It’s a lot easier to attract people to share your life if you’re comfortably off. It’s even easier when you’re rich.

Comfortable

Now, of course, many people will say that wealth can attract the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But I see no reason why your discriminatory powers should desert you just because you have more money than the average person.

The nice thing about money is that it enables you to live well. Money, as Canadian

self-improvement guru Bob Proctor is wont to say, was never intended to make you happy. It’s intended to make you comfortable.

So what about happiness? It’s true that money can’t buy you love, but so what? You can make finding the perfect partner one of your other goals.

Alternatively, you could aim at both, and visualize the ideal person as someone who’s also wealthy. Some people have a problem with this. They think, particularly when it comes to marriage, that it’s better to marry for love rather than for money.

But why not settle for both? And as statistics tell us that the average marriage contracted today has only a one-in-two chance of lasting, wouldn’t it be better to have something worth dividing up in the event of a parting?

In case this sounds a bit cold-blooded, it’s worth remembering the time-honored advice—which, judging by the statistics, is forgotten or ignored by at least half the population—that marriage isn’t something to be entered into lightly. For one thing, it’s a lot more complicated, and expensive, to get out of as it is to get into.

Sense

But you know all this anyway. It’s just good sense to get to know that other person pretty well before formalizing the relationship—and that could mean years rather than months.

It’s been said that arranged marriages tend to last significantly longer than those which occur sponteneously. The idea of an arranged marriage, to many people in the West, sounds unappealing. But remember that for centuries this was the norm even in Europe, particularly amongst royalty.

If you set the right kind of goals, you can have it all: freedom of choice, the perfect person, AND a pot of money. 

I urge you to go for it.