Comparison is the thief of joy. (And your comparison is wrong anyway.)
Your neighbor, your buddy, and your kid’s friend’s parent? They’re not as financially successful as you think they are.
Promise. And here’s how I know…
After 18 years of looking under the financial hood of hundreds of families, I can tell you definitively: we all suffer from financial dysmorphia when it comes to the people we know.
And I’m not talking about the d-bag at your kid’s school flexing with a leased Macan Turbo.
I’m talking about when you’re sitting in a dark room late at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering why so-and-so is so much further ahead than you.
They just bought that rental property. They’re sending their kids to that private school. Their job title sounds so much more important than mine. How are they doing it? What am I doing wrong?
Just stop.
As a financial advisor, I naturally end up working with clusters of people who all know each other. (And yes, we take our privacy policy deadly serious.)
But here is what happens behind closed doors: when a Financial Zen Member introduces us to their buddy, sibling, or coworker, the intro almost always comes with the Member’s casual estimation of that person’s financial well-being.
And that estimation is usually double the reality. Sometimes less. Sometimes more. But no one has ever been introduced to us whose finances are equal to or better than the referee’s estimation.
Not. One. Single. Time.
It is ALWAYS less.
The person you think is completely crushing it is not nearly as well off as you think they are.
Believe it or not, THEY’RE worried about how their buddy is so much further along than they are, while hoping no one can detect their imposter syndrome.
Whatever you think you know about someone else’s income and net worth statement is almost certainly wrong.
Stop running a race against an illusion. You are on your own journey. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind, but in the end, the race is only with yourself.
