Yes, Rich Privilege Plays a Role. Here’s How You Gain More of It.

There are several finance blogs out there I read on a regular basis. A good amount of them discuss tips and tricks on lowering expenses that have little to no barriers for entry. I can’t tell you how many times people cannot see past the rich privilege these bloggers have built for themselves. These bloggers are those that chose to share their wealth of knowledge with the world, so that others can get a better situation in their own lives with their guidance.

Privilege insulates you from the suffering of others, but only if you choose to forget that suffering exists. I won’t lie to you, privilege is a major part of why many people have the riches they do. If having an advantage is all that’s stopping you from amassing your own riches, let’s dive into how you can make your own advantages.

Adapt the Advice to Your Situation

No two lives are ever alike. Thanks to human individuality and chaos theory principles it’s near-impossible to make anything applicable to every single human alive. Because of this, there’s a few things you need to consider when you get advice to take a certain course of action. Things like, what’s in it for the advice-giver? Why are they sharing this information? Should I take this advice? Can I tweak it into something better?

Doing this helps phase out “advice” that’s not actually best for you (looking at you, predatory scam ads). Once you’ve vetted the advice and found it to be in your own self-interest, work on incorporating it into your life.

“But I can’t do this EXACT THING you mention because this isn’t applicable to my SPECIFIC SITUATION!!!!!!”

Then, my friend, you will have to do something you have never done before: customize the advice in your head. Don’t say “I can’t do this!” Say instead “How can I use this?”

A great example is a Mr. Money Mustache article from a few months ago, where he talks about making his own pizza from scratch. This is obviously less expensive than ordering pizza delivery, which gets pricey with the extra labor costs and tip. A lady in the comments said she “doesn’t have time to make dough from scratch,” thus declaring she couldn’t gain anything from his advice. He actually customized the advice for her situation by suggesting she turn to frozen pizzas instead; at $4 a pizza it’s still a lot cheaper than takeout would be.

Thing is, this lady should have arrived at that conclusion herself. I’m assuming she’s going through her own fears that eat up her mental bandwidth, which makes it hard to see how you can optimize your actions to take that stress off. You see that type of short-circuiting in exhausted college students and newborn parents, who probably could live on top of the world if they weren’t wandering around like zombies.

Acknowledge Even the Greatest Privilege Can’t Help Everyone

In my About section my main quote is one attributed to Seneca:

Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.

There’s nothing that better encapsulates that than the failures of fortune’s children. The rich privilege some were born into is staggeringly high compared to the rest of the world. And yet, those same people – who have mind-boggling opportunities and advantages I can only dream of – can STILL manage to fall flat on their face!

One of the most astonishing finance studies I know of focuses on family and generational wealth. Pick out ten rich families. Doesn’t matter which ones, as long as you have a group of ten. All of them have incredible fortunes and millions of dollars; massive houses, private school for the kiddos, outrageous eccentric purchases, the works. Here’s the mind-boggling part: out of those ten families, only three of them will maintain that fortune for the next generation. And of those three, only one will manage to share the wealth with the generation after that.

That’s a ninety percent failure rate. And these are the people LITERALLY BORN IN THE LAP OF LUXURY. Done right they could never have a worry in their entire lifetime of living.

However, the key words here are not “born in the lap of luxury”. The key words are “done right”. Such as: done right, you can build the skills needed to enjoy a life of wealth. Done right, you can make your own breaks. Done right, you can avoid all the pitfalls these pitiful rich kids keep falling right into.

They had all the opportunity but none of the preparation. With your preparation, you’ll get what you need to do absolutely anything. Even the greatest rich privilege can’t help everyone, so you’ll make a different kind of privilege for yourself.

Brush Up on Your Creativity and Improvisational Skills

Pursuing financial wealth will get you closer to that mountaintop, aka your ideal life. Getting to that peak requires having the right preparation; that’s so you’ll best use opportunity when it comes your way. But there is such a thing as making your own opportunity, and ending up somewhere much higher than you first expected to reach.

Adapting financial advice to fit your situation requires creativity on your part. That alone can create opportunity right in front of you! Going with that pizza example from earlier, say I stop ordering takeout twice a week and fire up the oven instead. Voila, I suddenly notice I’ve got a lot more money in the bank than I used to. I might feel emboldened by this and take it even further, figuring out how to optimize my grocery bill now so I’ll reap the rewards later on autopilot. Maybe this takes more creativity to do, but the results are so worth it.

Your improv skills are also super helpful on your way to the top. Thinking on your feet is a tough skill to master, but one of the most crucial for success. Let’s say the unexpected happens to you and you end up in a conversation with someone rich and influential. Maybe you realize they can get you that high-paying job you’ve been aiming for. How can you secure that result when the conversation ends in a few minutes?

By thinking quick, that’s how. The answer is the same if you find yourself in a dangerous situation and need to extract yourself or another from the peril. Whenever time is of the essence, it’s improvisation that’ll save your bacon. Used effectively, improv can also act with creativity to boost your own advantages.

If you need an easy way to remember this article, it can be summed up in three words:

You’re welcome.

What have you done to make your own breaks? How have you best used – or squandered – the advantages you were given?