If you haven’t been watching the incredible show Squid Game, stop reading right now and go watch it. What… you’re still here? Alright fine, I’ll tell you the premise, but only because none of today’s post will make sense without it!
Squid Game is a Korean show about a number of individuals who are so incredibly indebted that their only chance to dig themselves out is to participate in a game, alongside other indebted contestants, where the winner receives a massive pile of money – millions and millions of dollars. To be clear, it’s NOT a gameshow (which I totally thought it was at first). No, it’s way better than a gameshow.
Anyway, watching some of the characters on the show, you have to wonder: what did you do to dig yourselves that deep into debt? In some cases, we’re told exactly what they did. In others, we’re left guessing. But you don’t have to guess; in today’s tongue-in-cheek post, I’m going to give you 8 things you can do right now to end up flat broke and buried under a pile of debt like the contestants on Squid Game. Ready? 🙂
Buy material things that don’t make you happy.
Who doesn’t love keeping up with the Joneses? They have so much nice stuff; you deserve it too. Nevermind the fact that the “shiny and new” feeling wears off every time you buy something new; it feels good for a couple days, doesn’t it?
Besides, your friends clearly like you based on all the material possessions you have and not your personality, so you need to keep buying things to impress them, or else they won’t hang around anymore!
Gamble with the intent to win.
Who doesn’t love the rush of adrenaline that come from saying those four magic words: “This time, it’s different.” Who cares that the odds are stacked against you; you’re going to be the one to beat them, no matter how many times you lose! You could have left your debit card at home and only brought what you could afford to lose, but no; that mentality is for losers, and you’re a winner. The Squid Game players believe that, and so do you.
Of course, it probably won’t feel that way when you look into your bank account and realize you’ve maxed out all of your debt and can no longer afford rent, or your mortgage, or food, or anything else for that matter.
Invest in things you don’t understand.
Shiba Inu bitcoin? Sounds sexy. Betting on futures? Let’s go. That thing you think was called an Offshore High-Yield Mortgage-Backed Leveraged Security? Sweet, better get in on it.
There are few better ways to throw away your hard-earned money than to invest in things you don’t understand. The cooler the name, the less you need to understand it; at least you’ll be able to drop that name during dinner conversations and it’ll sound like you know what you’re doing, right?
Never try to learn new things or upskill yourself for the future.
Learning new things is hard work. Besides, it could have the undesired effect of increasing your income, which will make it harder to dig your way into debt. Then you’d have to spend more on material things or gamble it away or something. No, you’re better off being completely stagnant and never doing anything to add new skills or make yourself more marketable as an employee.
Don’t keep track of your spending habits.
Who needs to know where the money comes from, or where it’s going each month? Better to just bury your head in the sand and keep swiping that credit card until the stripe wears off. It’s so much easier to do when you don’t watch the dollars vanish out of your account!
Tracking your spending habits might have the unwanted effect of making you feel guilty about all that spending on material goods and stuff, and who needs that? It only gets in the way of your ultimate goal of building up an insane amount of debt.
Pay only the minimum on what you owe.
This is a great way to make sure that you’re always paying the maximum amount of interest possible on all of your debts. If you pay any more than that, you might actually reduce the amount of interest you pay, and also the amount of debt – a double-whammy against your goals!
By paying only the minimum payment on all of your debts each month, you’ll make sure you stay in debt for as long as possible. Sure, eventually you might pay down your debt a little, but that’s like… 6,300 years away or something, so that’s a problem for future you!
Buy way more house than you need.
This is a great way to throw away any extra income you have. When you buy more house than you need, you can kiss all that extra money goodbye, because you’ll be spending it on things like a bigger mortgage, higher taxes, extra heating and cooling costs, and higher maintenance bills too. Which is perfect, because you’re trying to dig yourself deep into a debt pit!
As an added bonus, having all that extra space will make it way easier to keep filling it up with material things that don’t bring you any happiness. Just keep piling up until you have nowhere else to put anything anymore!
Wrapping it Up
In case you’re reading this absent-mindedly or have been hit in the head recently, I’m being wildly sarcastic in this post. All of these things represent the polar opposite of things you should actually be doing.
The sad thing is that, even though I was being sarcastic above, so many of us are guilty of at least one or two of the things on this list. You might have even been given well-meaning advice to “buy as much home as you can afford” with the thinking that your home will appreciate in value. And who hasn’t bought the odd material thing?
Sure, everything I wrote there sounds silly. But it might make you ask yourself: when was the last time you upskilled? Where DOES your money go every month? And did I really need that widget I just bought last month, just because I was served an ad on Instagram?
If it did, then I did my job. And had a bit of fun writing it, too! 😉 By the way, if you’d like to what you should be doing instead of these things, check out this other post I wrote.
