How to be Rich

My church did a 3 part message series on the topic of Living Large and the first message in that topic was “How to Be Rich”. While this might seem odd to be a message coming from a church, if you stick with me, I think you will understand and hopefully enjoy this point of view.

Rich. Flush. High on the Hog. Living Large. Having these words and phrases describe our life may not be our main ambition. But let’s face it: everyone agrees that it beats the alternative. So how much would it take for you to say that you’ve reached that elusive status? When would you know if you became rich? And if you were rich, then how would that affect the way you felt about yourself and the way you treated others? – Pastor Mike

Problem 1: Everyone tells us how to GET rich, but no one tells us how to BE rich.

Have you ever looked at money that way? It seems like every where we look, someone is telling us how we can get rich quick! We can work from home in our pajama’s 4 hours a week and we can get rich! Seriously?!

There is no one out there telling us how to be rich. Do you know someone who is rich? If you do, you probably know someone who is really bad at being rich too! What I mean by that is you see someone who is rich and wonder why they spend their money on such stupid things and you think to yourself, it that was me, I’d be better at it! I wouldn’t win the lottery just to piss it all away two years later! If I had that money, I’d……I’d be really good at being rich!



Problem 2: Rich people don’t realize they are rich!

How Rich Are you?

If you’d like to see just how rich you are, visit the site globalrichlist.com. This site shows a comparison of how rich you are as compared to the rest of the world. When I enter my annual income, I find that I am in the top less than 1% of the world. Crazy huh?

• If you make $37,000 a year, you are in the top 4% of richest people in the world.
• If you make $45,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of richest people in the world.
• A study done by Fidelity found that 42% of millionaires say they won’t be wealthy until they have more than $7 million in assets
• Of the 58 percent of millionaires who say they feel wealthy – up slightly from 54 percent in 2009 — they began to feel so at $1.75 million in investable assets

Problem 3: Rich is a label we resist – after all, it’s impolite!

When do we become rich? For most of us, that number will always be elusive. We will always want more and until we have more we won’t consider ourselves rich.

There is no huge energy shift if we make more money because none of us feel rich.

Things that Rich People Do

• Rich people take a perfectly good cell phone and sell it back for pennies on the dollar just so they can have the latest and greatest model of cell phone
• Rich people have a separate room for their clothes! (This is also known as a walk in closet). Rich people walk into this room for their clothes and delcare they have nothing to wear! They must be really rich!
• Rich people have a whole room in their house that is never used until a guest comes in. It’s fully furnished but sits empty most of the time.
• Rich people have a house for their car! Yes, it’s true! A house! This is also known as a garage.
• Rich people will decide they don’t like the look of a refrigerator, couch or chair and give it away just because it no longer fits with their taste.

I think you can tell from those points that I’m being sarcastic. We exhaust ourselves in trying to go after that elusive dollar amount of money that we think will make us happy even thought it’s something most of us have already achieved.



Problem 4: Being rich appears to be a moving target

Until we feel rich, we’ll try to get rich instead of acting rich.

Most of us are doing better today than we were just a few years ago. Yes even in a crappy economy. Picture this, if someone told you 15 years ago what you would be making today, most of us would have thought we would be rich! But do we feel rich today? Probably not. For most of us, the more we make, the more we spend.

When asked once, “How much money is enough money?” John D. Rockefeller replied, “Just a little bit more.”

Sound familiar? Feeling rich isn’t about gaining greater income, it’s about gaining greater perspective. The way society views money is we will never have enough and there is constant pressure to make more.

Lesson #1 – Admit that  I’m Rich

You may not have felt rich before you read this article, but has looking at money in this way helped you to put things in perspective?



Lesson #2 – Acknowledge that God wants me to feel GRATITUDE not Guilt

Money is funny like that, instead of feeling thankful for what we have, oftentimes we can feel guilty for a variety of reasons. Do you feel gratitude or guilt for what you have in your life?

What other thoughts and comments do you have on how to BE rich?

If you’d like to listen to the podcasts from this series, click here for the Living Large audio files and study guides.

Photo Credit: Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net