Why your income needs to grow each year

I am gonna keep this post short because this is an important lesson you can digest pretty quickly. Inflation is cucking you each year.

You might have noticed how everything gets more expensive each year, right? In 1948 you paid about 15 cents for a cheeseburger at McDonald’s. Now it’s at $1.00.

Prices don’t just randomly increase because the bosses are greedy. They have to increase due to how our money is set up.

Banks fucked it up

See, back in the 19th century, we had a gold standard. Which meant the banks needed to have the same amount of money they gave out to the public as paper money in their treasures as gold value. This way it was ensured that the money given out actually existed as value.

But of course, the banks didn’t stick to the rules. They never do. Greed knows no bounds. After World War I, lots of countries were almost bankrupt. The citizens were fearful and tried to get their money back. So they ran to the banks to withdraw the money. But the banks gave out more money than they had as reserves, and so the citizens didn’t get the money they had in their accounts.

Companies went bankrupt. People lost all their money, and the government tried their best to keep it under control.

(By the way, this is still true today. Even worse. Banks are only needed to hold – on average – about 2% of their liquidity as reserves. This means, if every person were to run to the bank and withdraw the money, well, you would never actually get any.)

Definite decisions

In 1933, Roosevelt and his cabinet made a decision that saved the world from a great depression but made money worthless forever. They dropped the Gold standard. Which meant, banks could now print money no problem. This made companies liquid again, but obviously, the money was worthless. Since it had no actual value backing it.

Fast forward multiple years, and trillions of dollars printed, the green money has lost over 90% of its value.

As you can see, there were other events which made it better or worse. But over all the years, the value decreased heavily. One Dollar in 1913 is only worth 5 cents today. Hence why luxury cars are now in 6-digit prices as opposed to 5 or even 4 digits back then.

We call this inflation.

You need to counter inflation

Currently, the inflation rate sits at about 2% each year (depends on your country and year, it gets adjusted, so check for your country on Google). So if you have money saved, and you don’t get at least 2% interest for that money, you actually lose buying power.

Hence why saving isn’t really a thing these days. But there are ways to abuse this stupid system and make stupid amounts of money out of it.

And that’s how I come back to the initial point. If you don’t get your paycheck increased by at least 2% each year, you are working the same for less money. If you get 2%, you work the same job, for the same money.

Anyone who works the same job for multiple years, and doesn’t have his paycheck increased, doesn’t need to wonder why he can afford less and less each year. Too bad we don’t learn this at school, right?

People in the know

The free market adopts to this constantly. Each year, the prices for everything increase. At least by that 2%, if not more to increase some revenue. They know how the system works. But they rather don’t tell their employees. Otherwise, they need to pay them more. What they don’t increase in your pay, is an increase in their revenue.

Now that you know this, it will pop up in your mind every time you see a letter somewhere saying, “Due to increased costs, we need to raise our prices to X”. The increased costs they are talking about, is the money becoming more worthless again. They’re talking about inflation.

So if you don’t want to get cucked, make sure your paycheck increases at least 2,5% each year. Or abuse the system and make money off of it.

–Alexander Graves