I’ve been doing these investment tips for 24 years if you can believe it. I can’t. But looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t write this one before.
When I was in my 30s, I had one of those conversations with someone “What if you were suddenly rich what would you do?” I said I’d go back and collect the comic books I loved as a kid. Since many would cost thousands of dollars for good condition original comics, it was (and is) a rich person’s pass time. But then I had a thought. What if I didn’t care about the condition of the comics? What if I didn’t care whether they were reprints? My goal was to get comics there were readable, not rare collectables. And so I decided to see how cheaply I could collect the first 300 issues of Spiderman, which was my favorite book as a kid.
I had the advantage of owning maybe 40 of those comics already, some in book form. It took me six months combing used books stores and comic shops, but I got all the Spiderman comics from 1 to 300. And it cost me only about $200.
This was a major league life lesson to me. What I thought would be crazy expensive became very affordable by just changing my goal a little bit. Think of how you can apply it. That expensive car you want might be available used for a 1/3 of the price. That home in an expensive neighborhood might be much cheaper two miles away. Tuition at Harvard is $53,000 a year. But tuition at the McGill, the ‘Harvard of Canada’ is $25,000 a year in US dollars. Do two years at a community college first, and that $200,000 degree from a top university drops to $50,000. And so on and so on.
It all boils down to asking one question. If there is something you want that you cannot afford easily, is there some way you can get 90% of what you want, for a heck of a lot less? Keep that in mind with any major expense you have.