Dakota Beerman

We have all had that feeling of losing money.

Let’s say your car breaks down, investment tanks, house leaks, a borrower fails to repay, or you spend money on something that sucked.

What’s your first thought?

Sh*t, F**k, D*mn [Insert your favorite explicit!]

Now I have to make this up.

LOSS.

I learned a different way to think about loss of money. It came from the bible + Rob Bell.

“Wisdom is better than Gold, to get insight is better than silver.” Proverbs 16

When we lose money we experience the following:

1. Pissed
2. Acceptance
3. Work hard or save up to get it back
4. Repeat

I want you to think about money lost as wisdom gained. Here is how you do it.

1. Use pattern recognition – “Has this happened before? How? Why?”
2. What is the pattern?
3. Sit in that question until you get an “Aha!”
4. How much did you lose?
5. What did you learn?

Wisdom = What you learned – What you spent

Example: I had a car that had close to 200k miles on it. It started having issues, so I started paying to get it fixed. The problem was, I kept putting money into it. What the heck?

I ask, what is the pattern here? It’s an old car, I keep putting money into it. It’s not getting better.

People would say to me, “Oh ya, these old cars…” “When I had ___ car I had this and that happen”

Finally someone told me, I don’t pay for new cars, but I also don’t spend money on old cars.

I asked, “How do you do that?”

He told me a principle he follows which is to buy cars in their prime value to life expectancy window. This window is about 90k – 200k miles. He won’t have any major car issues to pay for and when it comes to the end of it’s life he can sell it off and repeat this pattern.

This was the first time I had heard that.

The issue I had cost about $2,000 but the lesson will save me 10x or 20x that amount over my lifetime.

Money lost is wisdom gained.