Want to Become Wealthy?

Last week, I was with my 13-year-old, little brother from Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago. We just finished playing basketball and were on our way to grab some fast food when he started updating me on the recent, intense, dramatic and unforgettable events that occurred on Monday Night Raw.

Granted, in my heyday, I was quite the professional wrestling buff. Hulk Hogan's oscar-worthy portrayal of "Thunder-Lips" in Rocky III is one of my favorite moments in cinematic history.

But on this night, my only response for every wrestling match recap was "Really? Who's he?"

After my 5th response like that, my little brother started teasing me about my age and then asked, "Juan, how can you not know this? Don't you watch TV?"

There was a time in my life when I knew the television programming schedule like clockwork. I could recite every sports score, every music video and every minute of "Everybody Loves Raymond" like nobody's business.

Know why? Because I was flat broke and I had absolutely nothing better to do with my time.

It wasn't until I got married that things started turning around for me. When my wife and I started, I was making $20 dollars an hour with about $12,000 dollars in debt. I was 30-years-old and my FICO score was in the 500's, which nearly kept us from qualifying for a mortgage.

Even though I had a great track record of paying my bills on time, my income-to-debt ratio was too lopsided to make any sort of rapid improvement. Coupled with the fact that I now had to save for a wedding AND save for a down payment on a condo, I became worried that I might not hold my end of the financial responsibility.

Then, the most amazing thing happened to me...

My wife and I were setting our financial goals and determining our income, expenses and investments, when she asked one of the most important questions every man has to eventually answer some day:

"Baby, can you live without cable?"

I answered "Sure" when in all honesty, I had never really thought about it before.

"Good. Cause we can't afford it," she replied.

Since that time in 2002, my wife and I quadrupled our net worth because we spent more time reading simply because we had no other choice. We couldn't spend money going out all the time and there was nothing else better to do...

Don't get me wrong, we own a VERY nice 27-inch, flat-screen. But because we had (and still have) only 10 channels, our TV entertainment was literally limited to PBS, Sunday sports, Sunday night programming and the occasional DVD rental. Cable is like the internet: you can literally spend hours surfing without watching anything for a sustained amount of time.

When you have that many options, you're compelled to view every single one of them before you can make up your mind. And if you don't like what you see, you're compelled to view those options AGAIN!

My wife and I then found ourselves with more time available to take free classes, read more books, advance in our careers, learn how to travel inexpensively, exercise more often, reduce our debt and most important... SAVE MORE MONEY!!!

I used to knock my sister all the time. Her husband is a successful orthodontist and comes from a wealthy family. When they got married, he was very insistent on NOT having a television set in his house AT ALL. I just thought he was being strict and unreasonable, but I ignored it when I visited them. 14 years of marriage and four kids later, I understand my brother-in-law's position.

My nieces and nephew are straight-A students. The oldest is in 7th grade and has a 12th grade reading level WITH a college-level vocabulary and conversational style. These kids are NOT home-schooled. They just spent a lot of time at the public library because they had nothing better to do. They learned about Barney, Arthur and Pokemon from their friends, cousins and classmates, NOT television.

My concerns emerge when I hang out with my little brother. He's an 8th-grader with a 5th grade reading level and an incoherent conversational style. He hates to read, and the only time he does read is when I remind him that he'll get kicked off his school basketball team if he doesn't.

However, he can recite every line and action that took place during Professional Wrestling...

I responded to my little brother's question by informing him that "I don't watch television much anymore because I'm trying to make more money so we can go out and do things. You should do the same thing."

To which he replied, "Make money? I'm just a kid. Why I gotta' worry about that now?"

"Cause if you don't, you'll end up broke when you're an adult, just like I was."

"Man... You gotta' get with it, Juan."

I'm still working on him...

Let me point out that I understand the issues of poverty and that its general prevention comes from many different views and educated theories. I don't pretend to be an expert on anything other than my own experiences. However, I've learned that poor people and rich people have one universal common characteristic: time.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Donald Trump have. The difference is how we choose to spend and manage that time.

Having said that, I can guarantee one thing... These three men have absolutely no idea what happened on last week's episode of Grey's Anatomy.