I didn't go home when the rest of the battalion took off for the weekend.
Though I was officially not confined, I had a day-long bike orientation to driving on the WRONG (i.e. Right) side of the road on Saturday. Either I could book out at 7 pm and reach home around 9. Sleep early, wake up early, take an early train, and it's back to camp, or I could go on a crazed LAN session with a few others, and go back to camp to play the company's X-box, before collapsing into a similar heap, and end up with a splitting headache the next morning. Play was more than compelling enough to make up my mind.
And it turned out totally different from what I expected. I didn't touch the X-box, though the others who stayed behind were deeply immersed into "Winning Eleven". I was curious about "The Cashflow Quadrant", another book in the Rich Dad Poor Dad series. Financial intelligence is a remote, if not a completely alien topic to me. So far, the furthest I have stretched my mind upon this topic is when a broker-sponsored television series on investment aired. I knew that it wasn't what I wanted. $1,000 in seed money was something I had been unwilling to put up, so that stray thought on investment stayed at that: pure speculation.
Things moseyed along until I spotted a bunkmate reading "The Cashflow Quadrant". Having lent him the predecessor, I was rather tempted to find out just how much more this Japanese author had to offer, and I borrowed it for one weekend. Speeding through this book, I realised insights into the breadth of the financial world.
Robert exemplifies the predator-prey relationship (though these were not his actual terms) where people pay to take a risk in a piece of land, while the bank happily sits upon the loan agreement, secure in profiteering from the extreme interest rates due to it. Neither is it ever worried about payment lapses: they can simply foreclose the property and sell it again to another sucker.
As an "employee", I need to think like an "investor" in order to be able to achieve greater wealth: I should not be using the monthly paycheck for expenses: a prudently acquired asset (something which causes money to come in to me) would be a more suitable to finance my expenses, and to balance out liabilities (something which means money out of my pocket).
There's more which I would type about, if my brain were half-awake. More to come in the afternoon!
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