The road to wealth and/or financial independence is a long one. As such, it's important to stay motivated and focused. After all, it's quite easy to fall off track and hinder your own progress.
The Dave Ramsey fandom, for example, is fond of visual aids. They frequently use illustrated thermometers or game boards and color in portions to indicate their progress towards a savings goal or towards paying down a debt (even something as lofty as the mortgage on their house.)
The Dividend Diplomats came up with a game a while back where you calculate both your annual and hourly cost of living and use that to find out how much time your stock purchase paid for. These numbers can also be used to figure out how close you are to FI(RE).
Being a fan of DragonBall, it was only a matter of time before my brain provided another viewpoint by which to provide financial motivation. Said viewpoint was to compare it to something that the fans of the anime are all too familiar with, power levels.
In a way, that's what your net worth is, isn't it? It's your ability to face the various financial challenges that life provides. The more fiscal strength you have, the more you'll be able to pursue hobbies, support businesses, generate tax revenue, or give to charities. You could even view deploying capital in these fashions as very much akin to one of the franchise's many iconic beam attacks. First, you charge up your monetary energy via saving, than fire it at your target..
Now, one could use the comparison in a negative light and point to the gap between the 1% and the 99% being similar to Goku's and Vegeta's vast eclipsing of the rest of the cast. There is a difference, however. The two lead Saiyans do have the strictest training regiments of the cast, but one of the reasons they have skyrocketed the way they did was because of something called Zenkai, this is an innate biological ability where Saiyans get a power boost after recovering from injuries. Considering how many fights the pair get into over the course of the story, record growth is to be expected. They also benefit from the exponential growth that comes from the various transformations being power multipliers.
When it comes to finances, we have our own variations of these. There is compound interest/the dividend snowball where you start to make steadily increasing amounts of money off of your saved/invested money and a snowball effect starts to take place. I've seen some criticize this phenomenon, but that has always baffled me, as this is what you want to happen. It turns the process into a downhill battle, providing more motivation for you to get over the bumpy parts to the smoother waters ahead. Further more, everybody (yes, even you) can use it. It's math. Even if you are in a lower income bracket, you can still reap the benefits if you're committed and stick to a plan.
Our fiscal Zenkai would be acquired through investing in the market itself. Said market goes up and down depending on a myriad of factors. Sometimes (like now, for example) those swings can be large. If you keep a cool head and keep investing during the dips, you'll see your net worth increase much faster when the prices inevitably start to go back up, as you'll have acquired more shares when they were at a lower price.
Going back to the progress meters noted above, you could even use the "power levels" to indicate certain milestones. Mark a certain net worth as having hit "super saiyan" (maybe $100,000 as that first milestone is often cited as the hardest?) and go from there. You could always use something more official, but those later numbers are probably not too realistic. On the plus side, it does give you more milestones in the early portions, so it isn't without its upsides.
So, what do you think? Would this mindset result in more people going even further beyond and breaking their limits, or is it nerdy and eye-roll worthy?
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