Very important concept to give a name to. I upvote you today, because by tomorrow I’ll be convinced everything here has always been common knowledge.
That said, a lot of things are Out To Get You, but not You in particular, and the Get Ready approach ends up not being that hard. This is probably dangerous advice, but also true.
Examples: Credit cards. Sure, they charge merchant fees to keep the lights on, but the real money comes from borrowing. But I, and probably a lot of readers here, find it almost trivially easy to enjoy the convenience of a credit card without ever paying a cent in interest. Passive investing with Fidelity is also this way, everything is an upsell to make you buy a managed product, but for a true believer in passive investing it’s trivially easy to ignore.
Heck, I’ve even played a few free mobile games that I found worth playing for free, and have never felt close to tempted to put any cash into one. And I’ve been known to strategically use a free trial of a product I don’t want enough to pay for. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a cancellation on one of them.
The trick here, of course, is being a different person from the average target of these things.
Though another common feature of these things is that they mostly don’t lose money on me, they just don’t make any. Game downloads cost nothing, credit cards have merchant fees, and Fidelity index funds charge expense ratio. So they have no incentive to eliminate those they can’t Get.
Very important concept to give a name to. I upvote you today, because by tomorrow I’ll be convinced everything here has always been common knowledge.
That said, a lot of things are Out To Get You, but not You in particular, and the Get Ready approach ends up not being that hard. This is probably dangerous advice, but also true.
Examples: Credit cards. Sure, they charge merchant fees to keep the lights on, but the real money comes from borrowing. But I, and probably a lot of readers here, find it almost trivially easy to enjoy the convenience of a credit card without ever paying a cent in interest. Passive investing with Fidelity is also this way, everything is an upsell to make you buy a managed product, but for a true believer in passive investing it’s trivially easy to ignore.
Heck, I’ve even played a few free mobile games that I found worth playing for free, and have never felt close to tempted to put any cash into one. And I’ve been known to strategically use a free trial of a product I don’t want enough to pay for. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a cancellation on one of them.
The trick here, of course, is being a different person from the average target of these things.
Though another common feature of these things is that they mostly don’t lose money on me, they just don’t make any. Game downloads cost nothing, credit cards have merchant fees, and Fidelity index funds charge expense ratio. So they have no incentive to eliminate those they can’t Get.