Hello, my name is Jesse Meekam, and this is podcast number 4002 for Wine Aam, where we teach you

four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money.

Today I want to talk about a question that we rarely ask, and we've talked about it before

as it relates to what we sometimes call Rule Zero. Now rule one is to give every dollar a job,

but rule zero is really to decide what those jobs are. And then I am almost positive there may be a rule behind that believe it or not and

that is why why are those your priorities why are you doing this?

Now, this question, this discussion is probably more well suited for those that have a bit more debt or are really really close. Maybe they've

even paid off their mortgage or they're really really close. You're shoveling some money into retirement,

things are looking as good as they've ever looked,

and you may even have a little bit of,

I'm going to say excess, but I don't want it to have the negative connotation that it might normally have in your thinking.

So you have a little bit of extra. Let's call it extra and you start to wonder why are you doing all this? Why are you saving like you save? Why are you

frugal like you're frugal? Why do you buy what you buy?

And I've often been haunted by the thought

that we don't even realize what is influencing us.

Talaeb, one of my favorite philosophers, he calls this basically constructed preferences.

They're not your preferences, they're constructed on your behalf and you aren't really aware of them. He talks about how you should

examine who has skin in the game to find those constructed preferences and

figure that out, but it's a little bit beyond the scope of a three minute

podcast. All I want to say is it's one little bit beyond the scope of a three minute podcast.

All I want to say is it's one of the hardest questions to confront,

and that is the why.

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