Our Lifestyle Today

Lifestyle is supposed to be determined and dictated by one's ability to generate and manage money. If we as parents extend the privilege of our lifestyle to our children that is our choice. However it is also our duty to impart upon them the most basic rule of life: Earn it, then live it.
I certainly have not resolved the logic behind giving grade school kids an allowance or ''baon''. Pocket money is normal but giving an allowance nowadays is viewed as an entitlement or a salary for going to school.

The riches of millionaires have become what they are through one simple word: WORK. Parents who persist on ''bribing'' or extending an earned money to their children are destroying their children's future by failing to instill in them in good work ethic, the value of savings, and raising them with an unrealistic experience with wealth and money. This perhaps is the reason why we have a growing number of malcontents in the workforce. Their childhood entitlements cross over to their adult expectations that life owes them or they deserve it.

Now more than ever American media and society have begun to confront the aftermath of this social mistake. Faced with broken marriages and careers brought about by financial mismanagement, Americans today admit that they have become obese in body, in lifestyle an in attitude. They have realized that they have given more focus to the pleasures rather than the discipline. So instead of three credit cards and three cars they are cutting down to real needs and real essentials.

We unfortunately don't even have the foundations. Work as an errands, summer jobs, or part-time stints are not given value. Its all about grades. Its all about being in the right crowd and the right schools, yet ultimately ending up as employees. Many of the real rich and successful people in our society were not even great students. But they all had to earn a living and they also had a life.

Saving and delaying gratification is not taught mostly because the parents themselves are ignorant or incompetent in this area. Saving as they practice it is a result of leftovers or surplus and not intentional or by design.

If you have time read the proverbs of Solomon. Some of the most popular business philosophies is based on this book in the Bible. For all you hard workers: ''Be sure you know the conditions 0f your flocks, give careful attention to your herd; for riches do not endure forever, and a crown is not secure for all generations''.