Personal finance experts don’t get wealthy by following their own advice

You can be "rich" by having the freedom to spend your time on what you want, and appreciating the cornucopia of luxuries that make up a typical American middle class life.

You can get there by living (happily!) on a lot less than 100% of what you make, and saving the rest. With some simplifying assumptions about investment returns, the actual dollar amount a person makes doesn't matter; it's just the fraction of their net income that they need to maintain their lifestyle that informs how long until retirement. E.g. if you can save 50% of your income, you can retire in 17 years. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

To give an example; the article mentions Dave Ramsey talking down to his callers and giving generic advice such as cutting up your credit cards. I don't follow Ramsey too closely and can't read his mind, but I'd bet he's optimizing his advice for the least common denominator within a mass audience of financially troubled people. A small percentage of financially desperate people would hear great advice about credit cards (only use cards to buy stuff you have 100% of the cash for, and pay them back instantly to get some cash and rewards back) and not internalize that as something like (it's okay to keep using my card because I'm getting money back as long as I try and pay my bill every month). For a mass audience, the safest advice on credit cards that might make an impact is to just tell everybody with a financial problem to stop using them. On an individual level, a financial expert can probably give better advice that's more suitable.

If I had to give 1 bit of general financial advice though: develop your talent stack. It doesn't matter if it's learning a new programming language, wood-working, learning to fix cars or toilets, taking a foreign language class, learning how to paint, or growing a great garden. If you have multiple skills you have more opportunities to make money as well as combining those skills in unique ways to create new business ideas and concepts. And baring some health issue, nobody can ever take a skill away from you.

I think this is called a trust: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_law

Also, if you are so inclined, check if you can replace your habit of trawling Amazon for stuff to buy with trawling Amazon looking for stuff to buy in the future. Personally, looking forward to buying the thing is at least 60% of the enjoyment.

Anyway, try seeing a psychotherapist. Someone serious with a degree. Your money problems seem to be at least partially learned, so they can be unlearned.

50 years ago, 70 years ago, an enormous series of treatments we now have, did not exist.

And even disease treatment options, even knowing how some diseases worked? Nope.

So medical care was less costly, because, there was literally less to be done. And people died at home more often too, as a result.

So naturally medical care was less costly.

And housing, the average family did not have a ginormous, 6000sq foot house. Try 1000 sq foot, 1500 sq foot as a norm.

So sure, less cost.

Same with all these fancy dodads.

Yes, 100% housing is more expensive due to low rate mortgages, and other reasons.

But in non-crazy priced locations, you can still build a small 150k, 250k house with land all in.

Some of it is indeed changing wages vs costs, but some is "more" vs wage.