How Much A Scarcity Mindset is Costing You
Summary
A scarcity mindset is costing you hassle, pain, and actual money.
Here are lessons I’ve learned about how “saving” money on something will cost you in the end.
- Choices have consequences. The decisions you make on everything (and not just the things you buy) will have consequences on your life. For instance, when you choose to neglect your health now, and then something that you’re not prepared for happens to you, it will affect the quality of your life.
- “When you invest in the best, you only suffer once.” -Zig Ziglar. You’ll be saving yourself more money and pain if you spend a little more on something that lasts, than have to pay more for repairs in the future.
- Start focusing on having more money and stop focusing on “saving” money. Because you don’t “save” money by buying cheap. Raise your income…that’s how you save time and money.
Decide to make enough money to afford the things you want and to be able to help more people. When you shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. It will change your life.
Full Transcript
Hey there, it’s Kevin Ward and this story is in an ironic sort of way kind of painful for me because it just sends me back to my old ways of thinking and about how a scarcity mindset, i.e. otherwise known as a broke mindset, how much it can cost you, how much did it cost you in hassle, in pain, in lost opportunity, in an enjoyment and actually costs you in money?
A true story on the price of having a scarcity mentality
So here’s what happened. I have an old friend that I’ve known for a long, long, long, long time. And this last year spring, he bought a Sea-Doo. Now Sea-Doo is like the big jet ski, it’ll seat three people on it, massively big, almost like a little boat, but it’s straddling. It’s got a steering wheel thing on it, or steering handlebars on it.
And he got a great deal on it because the reverse gear on it, where you put it in reverse was broken and he’s like, “Meh, who needs a reverse? You never use reverse on a Sea-Doo.” Anyway, so I’m going to get it because I’m going to get a great deal. But whenever you get the great deal and save money, because something’s not working on it right, you’re asking for trouble, but this is the way he thinks.
And I get it because it’s the way I grew up being taught. So what I thought for most of my life, and that is, we always was like, “Save as much money as you can. The way you get a good deal on, is you find something that’s not quite right, but man, you get a good deal on it and just live with the problems,” and so forth. So here’s what happened. He took his new Sea-Doo out for the first time, launched it on the lake and he was going to take it over to the dock and it wouldn’t run right.
Now, he was smart and planned ahead, so he had a paddle on the Sea-Doo just in case it wouldn’t run right. But it was a windy day, he got caught out in the wind and he got past the dock and it was like he couldn’t get back to the dock and so he grabbed the paddle and he started paddling his way to make it back to the dock. And as he’s doing it after about three or four strokes, all of a sudden he feels this pop in his shoulder and it’s like, oh, a stab of pain. He’s like, “Oh, that hurt.” And then he just keeps pulling it, but he’s got to get back because the wind’s blowing him away from the dock, so he’s got to get back. So he’s just humping it, battling it and the pain just keeps getting worse and worse and by the time he finally gets back to the dock, he’s just in excruciating pain and long story short, he has completely torn loose one of the muscles in his shoulder from the bone. It was just completely, literally torn loose.
Now, he didn’t know that at the time, but after five or six months of excruciating pain or four or five months, months of excruciating pain and discomfort and not getting better and not being able to move it, he’s like, “Hmm, maybe I need to go get it checked with the doctor.” He goes, get it checked, they look at it, they do whatever they do to it and they go like, “It’s completely torn. We’re going to have to do surgery to fix it.” Now he’s older than I am and so he’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go through the surgery.” So he went through the surgery and they fixed it. Now, it was pretty intense surgery and cost him a few thousand dollars with interest deductible and all that kind of stuff.
And I got a text message from him today … no, it wasn’t today. It was yesterday. And here is the text message. I ask him how he’s feeling and all that.
He goes like, “It’s not so bad now. The pain was bad. I finally got the right painkiller at the first aid, now all is well. The worst thing is that I have to wear this $1,200 sling…” On his arm to hold his arm steady. “$1,200 sling for four months, day and night.” That’s the text message. Now, what’s that the biggest thing? One, four months of your arm being in a sling after four or five months of being an excruciating pain and his biggest complaint is he had to pay $1,200 for a sling that insurance would not cover. This whole surgery and everything cost him a few thousand dollars. Again, insurance picked up most of it and I’m like, “Dude, if you had just bought a brand new Sea-Doo, you would have paid no more money than you ended up paying for a broken Sea-Doo and a surgery and a $1,200 sling.” Now that my friends is an illustration of the cost of our choices.
Lessons I learned about how much a scarcity mindset costs you
Now I’m going to break it down for you a little bit here, because these are lessons that I’ve learned, the lessons that I’m learning in my life. And I want to hear your comments because you may disagree with me on some of my lessons learned. So I want to hear what you got to say. And if anything’s happened to you like this, if you’ve ever made this kind of a decision to save money and it ended up backfiring and costing you more money, but that thing is it didn’t just cost you more money, it actually cost him more in time. It costs him more in pain. It costs him more in all kinds of stuff.
Here’s the lessons I’m taking out of this.
Lesson #1: Choices have consequences
Number one is choices have consequences. Our choices have consequences. The choices that we make have consequences in our lives. And we make a choice that we made to save money and then all of a sudden it creates these other things.
Now here’s the thing. He didn’t just make the choice to save money. He also made the choice on a day in day out basis, he never exercises. He’s not in shape. And so when he grabs a paddle and all of a sudden this hard pull in the water with his several hundred pound or I don’t know, however heavy it is, this Sea-Doo and the wind’s blowing against you and all of a sudden you start pulling that hard, you put strain on muscles that are not conditioned for that and guess what? Something’s going to break and that’s what happened.
You don’t think about that, but it’s your choices of the way you treat your body and all of that have consequences when you’re not prepared for something and all of a sudden, bam, you have another consequence. So we started out to save money and then it ended up costing us more money because of something totally unrelated to the Sea-Doo but now you got health issues and all this, and it’s not just the financial cost.
It’s also the cost in quality of life. It’s the cost of having to endure and suffer pain for months and then not being able to use your arm for another four months because it’s in a sling night and day. So one lesson learned, choices have consequences, not just a choice of what to buy, but choices of decisions we make about how we take care of our body and take care of anything. The way we take care of our money, the way we take care of our stuff.
Lesson #2: “When you invest in the best, you only suffer once.”
Second lesson that I take away from this and that is, I remember something Zig Ziglar said years ago. And he said, “When you invest in the best, you only suffer once.” And what he meant by that, when you go to buy something, buy the best, buy something that will last, buy something that works right, buy something brand new, because it’s more painful upfront if you have to pay more money for it, but you’ll only have to be in pain one time and that is when you have to part with all that money and it’s like, “This is more expensive than I thought.”
But once you do that, you’re going to get a better product, whatever it is you’re buying, you’re going to get a better product that’s going to work for you the whole time and you get to enjoy it more and it’s going to last longer because you invested in something that was good. Now I’m not opposed to buying used stuff like a used car, pre-owned as they call them now. Nothing wrong with a pre-owned thing. But again, it just has consequences. When you buy something going in, you know it’s broke, you bought something broke. And so your time, you’re going to spend time compromising with and having to negotiate and deal with the thing that doesn’t work right because you bought something broke to save money, which leads us to my third take away from my observation and that is…
Lesson #3: Start focusing on having more money and stop focusing on saving money.
And when I say saving, I’m not talking about just putting money in savings. I’m talking about buying stuff, cheap stuff so that I don’t spend as much money. So I just saved a thousand dollars by buying this used thing that was broken. Focus on making more money, not saving more money, raise your income and you save time and money. So if he had taken and bought the best, invested in the best, bought a brand new Sea-Doo, then chances are one, he had never had to have a paddle on that boat, because it would have been a new boat and it would work and he would be able to go out and enjoy it and from day one, he’d be able to enjoy it more, spend more time. He would not have injured himself, would not have had to have surgery and all of that stuff. And you get to enjoy something nicer the entire time.
My friend, if you’re one of the people that is like I was, that looks at stuff and goes like, “That’s too expensive. That’s ridiculous. That’s a rip off. I can’t afford that.” It’s not that things are too expensive, it’s just that you’re too broke. And I don’t mean that in an insulting way so please don’t take it that way. It’s just that if you had more money, you would not think that same way. “Well, it’s still a rip off.” I get it. I get it. Almost everything you buy today, it’s a rip off, but that’s what it costs to buy the stuff that you want. So guess what, this is one of the things I’ve said for years, I decided I want to make enough money that I can afford the rip offs of the world.
When you focus, not on how expensive things are, but focus on, I can make the money to be able to buy the things that I want. I want that. What do I need to do? I need to make more money. And I make enough money, then I don’t have to look at the price tag. I just look at what I want. I want to be able to help somebody. Well, how much is it? I can’t afford to help them. Well, if you have more money, you can afford to help people and you don’t have to ask how much it is. Just ask, “What do you need?” “Perfect. Here you go.” So when you think that it’s not that things are too expensive or I don’t have enough, it’s how do I get more? And this shift is from a scarcity mindset of there’s not enough, I can’t afford it, that’s too expensive to an abundance mindset that says, “What do I want?” “What do I need to do to get that?” “How do I make more money?”
Because when you ask those questions, you find the right answers for that. A scarcity mindset, my friend, is costing you. It’s costing you opportunity. It’s costing you time. It’s costing you grief. It’s costing you frustration. And it’s costing you enjoyment. Abundant mindset. In every market, in every economy, in every time, an abundance mindset will lead to an abundant lifestyle. I want to hear your thoughts. I know this is one of those sensitive conversations, when we talk about having money, making money, making a lot of money, having a lot of money and all that kind of stuff. So I want to hear your thoughts, but I just want to look at how different a life can be when you come from a place of abundance, rather than a place of scarcity.
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