People spend money they don’t really have on things they don’t really need to impress people who don’t really care. Or,

People spend whatever money they do have on things to comfort themselves instead of dealing with what’s making them unhappy or learning how to better cope with life situations or people.

Perhaps you are a combination of the two.

If so, you may know this is true from the large size of your credit card balance or, if you don’t use credit, the small size of your savings…either way, you have less money at the end of the month than you’d like.

Why play the game!? Take yourself out of it.

You aren’t alone…let me share a couple trends they may not know about that will support this.

Consider, for instance, that the average home size right after WWII (in the mid 1940s) was 750 square feet. The home size has steadily increased to where in 2001 it was 2,300 square feet!

That’s more than twice the home size and yet family size has gone down. We aren’t putting people in our houses. No, we’re either wanting a bigger house simply for self-image reasons or because we are cramming our house full of more and more stuff.

Speaking of stuff….

It was in the 1980’s that 3 car garages became popular. Think about it…in the 80’s most peoples GARAGES were bigger than the houses in the 40s and 50s!

What do people put in their garages? Few use all 3 slots for cars…most people use one or more slots for stuff and park their car on the driveway.

If that’s not enough consider this….The storage industry went from next to nothing in the 1960s to a $12 billion a year concern in 2000. That was bigger than the U.S. music industry that year! Don’t you wish you had stock in it?

How did our parents and grandparents manage to live as, or more, happily than we do with a lot fewer material possessions?

How is it most of them had more free time than we do even before “time saving” equipment?