Yes, You can Afford it

Yes, You can Afford it

Correct Your Beliefs about Money

Orison Swett Marden

The idea that riches are possible only to those who have superior advantages, more ability, or those who have been favored by fate, is false and demoralizing.

Don't deceive yourself by going through life patronizing cheap things, wearing cheap clothes, looking seedy, with the belief that you are doing the wisest thing. Remember that your appearance will largely determine your status in society. The world accepts or rejects us by the evidence of our personality, the impression we make.

The feeling that you can't afford this and you can't afford that; always dwelling upon something cheap, cheapens your life, cheapens your mentality, limits and narrows it, dwarfs your personality and makes anything but a favorable impression.

Wise, thrifty, and often generous expenditure in the thing which helps us along the line of our ambition, which will make a good impression, secure us quick recognition, and help our promotion, is often an infinitely better investment than putting money in a savings-bank.

Some people never get out of the world of pennies into the world of dollars. They work so hard to save the cents that they lose the dollars and also the larger growth, the richer experience and the better opportunity.

Multitudes of people think too much about poverty and economizing. They dwell upon the "can't-afford-it" philosophy, and continually feel the pressure of the rainy-day idea, which has been dinned into their ears from infancy, until it stunts and dwarfs the whole life.

Many families live constantly under the shriveling influence of the stinginess consciousness, the lack and want consciousness, the conviction that the good things of the world were intended for others but not for them.

As a result they have never been able to demonstrate anything else but lack, want and limitation. Multitudes of children are reared in this poverty atmosphere, and in time become so convinced that they can't afford things that others have that they never do have them.

Their poverty conviction shuts off the supply. They think the little thought and they demonstrate littleness.

Getting along with little and being half-satisfied to continue doing this, generally means that we shall have to get along with less, for it is not a creative mental attitude, not an attitude which attracts plenty and builds success.

I know people in fair circumstances who live so completely in the poverty conviction that they are always hunting for bargains, are always buying cheap things,—cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap furniture, cheap everything.

The result is that nothing they have wears or lasts any length of time. While they pinch and screw on prices and think they are saving, they really spend more in the end for poor cheap stuff which is always coming to pieces than they would need to spend on good things, because these would last so much longer than the inferior articles, to say nothing of the infinitely greater satisfaction they would give.

Bargain hunters are nearly always victims of false economy; and women are special offenders in this respect. They will waste hours of precious time, sometimes most of a day, and suffer much discomfort in chasing around from one store to another, looking for bargains and trying to save a few cents on some small purchase they wish to make.

Success attracts success. Money attracts money. Prosperity attracts prosperity, and it pays you to get with people who are prosperous, who have honorably won out in what they attempted.

If you are thinking and constantly saying, "I can't afford to do this," or "I can't afford that," "We must make this do," "Money is so scarce," you are sowing the seed which will give you the same kind of a harvest. Your poverty thought will make your future as narrow and limited and poverty-stricken as your present.