Good Money, Bad Money. Financial Education By My Dad.

We have some common hobbies with my Dad. We are both into hiking, beer, and drawing in pencil.

But in many aspects, we couldn’t be any more different. One of these aspects is the attitude towards money.

We recently had a conversation on this subject matter. The occasion was my getting interested in NFTs as the next big trend among young people.

We agreed with my Dad that NFTs are a gamble. Most of the projects will go to dust within a year or two (or earlier!).

According to Forbes, that turned out to be prophetic: the broader NFT market went on to crash, leaving the vast majority of collections essentially worthless. But, we disagreed on something else.

According to my Dad, there are two types of money – and it has nothing to do with the currency itself. Namely, my Dad doesn’t see investing (regardless of how speculative it is) as an equal way of accumulating money. The proper way is earning, producing value, getting paid for it, and then paying income taxes.

Or, in other words, in his eyes, the value of 1 Euro is different depending on whether you earned it, or won it.

For instance, for him, money earned from investing in NFTs is “bad money.” Firstly, in the process of acquiring this money you don’t build or polish any professional skills that would contribute to your whole character arc. You are not making any entrepreneurial career either.

Secondly, you don’t sweat enough while making this money. Therefore, you will not be disposing of them wisely, and you can gamble and lose this money in no time.

Is It Really Like a Casino?

My Dad likes to compare this situation to a casino. If you have beginner’s luck and made your money by sheer luck, you soon start gambling more and more, until you lose everything.

In a sense, when you win your money instead of earning it, it is sort of tampered with. It is doomed to evaporate sooner or later, in one way or another. Interestingly, according to Barber and Odean (2000), overconfident individual traders do reliably underperform the market. 

Of course, this attitude has some merit. After all, a famous research study by Brickman et al. (1978) demonstrated that a year after the lucky day, lottery winners are not happier than before the lottery.

According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, winners even reported less pleasure from small, everyday pleasures than non-winners did. And, most of them lose money entirely. 

So, I would say this is true… but only for the first time. Once you lose everything, you will never make the same mistake again.

You will learn once and for all times how to take proper profits. It is like touching fire and getting burnt. It won’t happen twice.

All The Games of the World.

We both play games with my Dad. Except, as a chess player, he can see the face of his opponent, while, as an investor, I don’t see the crowd of people I am playing against.

His game is 1-1, my game is all against all. His game is deterministic, my game is probabilistic.

He loves his game, I love my game. He finds his game noble as it is a tradition lasting for thousands of years. I find my game noble as it allows me better understand people and the way they make decisions. 

But we both play. We win, lose, and then win again.

And, we accumulate capital. It’s a beautiful life.

Where Does The Value Of Money Come From?

And that’s the real question. Does it come from the emotion of enthusiasm that you get once the cash arrives on your account, or from what you can do with it?

Whenever I get money, I always think of what I can do with it. If I have a particular goal in mind, and this goal is important enough, I will always stake the money instead of gambling them. It doesn’t matter where the money came from.

Money Versus Goals: Which Matters More?

In other words, for me, there are no better or worse ways of getting money. (as long as it is legal and ethical, of course). There are only better or worse goals.

For instance, I find the goal of buying a Lambo or spending the money on expensive gadgets not cool, to say the least. I believe in the value of modest, simple life. According to Kahneman and Deaton (2010), day-to-day emotional well-being stops rising with income beyond a fairly modest threshold anyway.

How Does My Dad See It?

Interestingly, my Dad represents the exact opposite attitude. For him, a proper sweat is the only right way of getting wealthy – other than that it’s just asking for trouble.

However, in his view, we shouldn’t judge people for the way they choose to spend their money. They could buy whatever they want, including a car for $10 million or a butt surgery for $100,000 (or, however expensive that is).  A beautiful life is just totally up to them.

To sum up, to my Dad, it doesn’t matter what your goal is as long as you properly sweat to get what you want. To me on the contrary, it doesn’t matter what you do to raise funds for your goal, as long as your goal is noble enough.

Last year I worked on my goals. In the future, I would like to buy or build a facility where people would build projects and careers together. Whether the money comes from my company or trading Catecoin, I don’t care.

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What is your opinion? Is there just one proper way of making money? Or is the money obtained from investments tampered with?