Chasing Money or Choosing Peace

by Maxwell Gates, LDS Living Magazine, Jan/Feb Issue

People think being rich means having the ability to buy more things, but I believe those who choose not to spend their lives chasing the almighty dollar are far richer than those who do.

Frank and Judy Williams saw their son Kyle grow into a solid, well-educated young man. He had great friends growing up, served a good mission, and attended BYU where he got his biology degree in preparation for medical school. “We were thrilled to see him fall in love with a wonderful girl. Our blessings and our happiness increased when she came into our family and loved our son as much as we did,” they recall. He was just a broke college student, yet “his eyes never looked happier,” Judy remembers. Then, almost without warning, Kyle called one night to tell them he had decided to quit his medical school to follow a friend’s business proposition.

Frank and Judy were stunned. “Our first shock was to hear him say he found something that would make a lot of money really fast,” recalls Frank. Kyle and his friend planned to buy houses using someone else’s credit and then pull equity from the homes to make yet bigger investments. They had a line of willing young people, and even seasoned adults, with just the credit scores they needed. In a long and complicated plan that felt more like a scheme, the two boys were happy to discover they would get rich fast by leveraging everything for something.

There was a time when protecting your good name and credit was supposed to be for your own good, not for the good of others. Today, some people have found their good credit is worth a lot of money to someone else who needs good credit. History proves that a desperate attempt to get money is nothing new, but the schemes are getting craftier, and just a little greed is all it takes. Psychologists have spent decades studying the relationship between wealth and happiness. Today’s young people play a very interesting role in the results of some of the most recent studies. According to one study comparing grown children’s lifestyles to that of their parents when they were starting out, young people today live in bigger homes, drive not only nicer cars but more of them, and eat out almost as much as they eat in. But, mathematically speaking, they are not any richer than their parents were at the same age. It seems some people confuse being rich with the ability to buy more things. But actually, many people who appear to be rich are really just borrowing more and thus spending more. And at the end of the month they are not any richer than when they started.

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