Something they don’t want you to know about money

Here is something the banks just don’t want you to know about money. Money is a lie. It’s totally fictional. There was a time….a little over 40 years ago, when your dollar was technically worth something in gold.

Then when the gold standard was abolished, the dollar really became just a piece of paper. Of course by that point you could not trade it in for gold anyway.

Now even paper is money is on the way out. It’s all electronic. When you get paid the money is in your account…in a computer…really just a bunch of ones and zeroes next to each other. When you pay your debts, you are just transferring one bit of information. That’s all. No one stops off with the actual money next week, nothing changes. No one gains or loses anything except a couple of notations on their online banking portal.

So what’s the real boundary? Why does money and debt control our lives?

Part of the reason is money and debt is used as an instrumental of stigmatization. A long word meaning the attempt to put a label on you…and not a very good one. A financial obligation can be problematic, especially when it is bound with an agreement, such as usually the case in debt scenarios.
But the majority of the substance around debt, and around money, comes from people. Specifically the little guy who feels guilty and afraid from having debt. The rich know money is just a concept, and they are well off. But they capitalize on feelings of ill will that come about as a result of it.

Debt is the process of giving something valuable in exchange for a pledge to repay. Then you pay for the process with interest. That’s how a creditor determines what is the most amount of money they can get out of you over the longest amount of time. Of course, once your financial situation changes, so does that formula. but they don’t tell you that. They have a whole different way of looking at people that are in dire straits.

You see, the reason your interest rate was so high to begin with is because they fully expect a large portion of their debtees to not be able to repay. They have already calculated on your default and hedged their loss over a million other transactions.

There is nothing moral attached to the act of borrowing money. It is neither right nor wrong to borrow or repay. It’s a question of profit and loss.
And money, in of itself, has become nothing more than a series of numbers on a computer screen.

I hope you have enjoyed this existential examination of financing and debt. And I hope you have walked away with the concept that free will and rational decision making should guide your financial decisions. Not outdated notions of morality.