Since there is an election here soon, today was the day that all the main candidates did a live televised debate. For the most part I was expecting a a stereotypical political debate with people avoiding questions and trying to make others look bad. Since the economy and provincial debt was a big issue I was actually interested if people could actually learn any good financial management lessons from the government, so to speak.
If I was to try and relate the situation and answers that I heard compared to an average person’s financial challenges, it almost sounds like a person living in say a million dollar home with a mortgage that is way beyond their means while trying to raise a family. As a result, to me it feels like their solution to pay off that debt is to continually pay for various ways to try and give their kids resources and support that they feel would give them a competitive advantage in life where hopefully one day they will grow up and help them to pay off their debt.
How would you go about paying off that debt assuming the scenario is you cannot say move to a new home? Like in this case I highly doubt people would want to tell their kids for example that they can’t say go to a good school because of financial restraints. So they would instead rather incur the debt. Trying to think of a solution in this case, I think one obvious solution that many would do is make more money. That usually comes in the form of potentially doing side work or starting a part time home based business that requires very little investment if any.
What an interesting thought that was I thought. For example, instead of a government official trying to reduce a debt by being like a venture capitalist when they don’t have the money for it they need to literally find a way themselves to build something from ground up as would a regular person where the cost is more about their own labour and creativity. That is probably not plausible of course due to things like a conflict of interest that would probably arise. But that would be kind of neat I think.
While this is probably boring for many, I think stuff like this is a good way to learn from someone else’s experience even if they didn’t produce the desired result. It’s almost like an entrepreneur reading horror stories so that hopefully they can avoid the same mistakes.