There are thousands of ways to spend your money. This article is not about your day-to-day expenditure, or occasional vacation. This is about what to do to your excess money when you are rich, or if you are rich.
Let's build up a scenario of a rich person.
Making yourself is rich, is not an easy process, it needs hard work and perseverance. Specially if you are starting from zero in life. If you have no prior capital, inherited, you will spend most of your life to find out the financial freedom that you are looking for. And most of us would never get there. Yet, some of us will do. And most of the time it would be latter part of your life, and there will be few or more grey hairs, start to creep in and wrinkles start to form.
Let's imagine an engineer, who is in his fifties. He has liberated himself from his financial shackles and have excess wealth to last him until end of his life. Imagine he has two kids as well. They are about to be engaged and start a life on their own. What is the moral duty of the engineer to the society, or how should he spend his wealth?
He should keep aside enough sum to live comfortably (not luxuriously) rest of his life.
He should welfare his family, so they do not struggle like he did.
He has a moral duty to donate some to charity.
Would you agree? Let's us carefully examine each.
He should keep aside enough money to live comfortably. Of course you can spend your money, nobody would argue if you chose to travel the world in a five-star floating hotel, spending every penny you have earned. But that is not what Andrew Carnagie suggested when he wrote the Gospel of wealth in 1889. He suggested we have a moral duty to avoid a luxurious life as, our money have ability to save lives which otherwise would end up being dead, and suffering in gutters. This doesn't mean we can ever eliminate the poor. Yet, I think if we get together and be noble, that is not an unachievable target even. It's just we are selfish, trying to catch stars. If you would like to read about our moral duty, I have written previously about, Singer's famine relief argument.
He should welfare his family. Similar argument follows. He should welfare his family, so that they do not suffer, or undergo hardships that he faced. Of course, we cannot treat our family members like equal to any other person in the society. We have not gained that God's nature of seeing everyone equally. So, as long as you are human, you would treat your family special. However, like in case of yourself, this doesn't mean that we should buy horses and jaguars for each and every family member.
Gospel of wealth or How to spend your money?
This brings us to the last part of our argument. What would the engineer do to his excess wealth that he saved by means of sacrificing a luxurious life for himself and his family? He has moral duty to donate to Charity. But how? This is where The Gospel of wealth comes handy. Imagine the engineer has two kids, nothing extraordinary in them. If he divides his wealth equally among two kids, how successful are they going to get? I would say chances are very less. Often it happens our own offspring behaves differently than us, and often it is the case that they have different values and means. It is likely that they end up being ordinary, and not reach the heights that the engineer did himself. It seems not a good idea.
How about donating all of it to charity? He could cash all his savings and drive in the country into rural areas and donate it from door to door of poor. What would happen? That seems to be not a good idea after all. They will just spend their money and still be poor at the end of the day. Instead Carnagie argues that our engineer should spend his excess wealth in a meaningful way to reduce the poverty and suffering, to empower the poor society to build up their own out of the rabbit hole.
How can he do this? He should identify, individuals and organizations which aims to do just that. Or he could build his own organization, after all, for a man how faced such challenges in life this would not be a difficult task. Imagine he builds a school in a rural part of the country. And provide enough to sustain this school for a few decades till his death. The children who will be educated in this school could get out of their poverty themselves and help their families. And one or two of them would become engineers and if they know the "Gospel of wealth or how to spend money" we can carry on the good deeds over time.
Just then, you can relax, without killing yourself like a Dorien Grey.
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