Yesterday I fell in love. If you are not a car nut like me this will probably sound a bit silly but I fell in love with a car. I was out at a dealership and had 4 different cars that I wanted to look at, two of them were in my price range and the other two were on the upper limit of my price range. But the first car that caught my eye when I entered the dealership was a charcoal grey 500 series BMW just outside of my price range. Even though the car was a used one, it looked just like new and was obviously very well taken care of. The best thing about it though was the interior, it was fantastic, it was so good in fact that it redefined for me how good a car interior can be. Inside that car I felt right at home, there was nowhere I could look that was not made of a quality material and seemed like a natural part of the design. Before getting too caught up in a car outside my price range I decided to look at the cars I originally wanted to look at but after having had such an experience with the charcoal one none of the other cars seemed like proper cars but rather like cheap imitations of the real thing. I found myself back by the charcoal BMW for some more drooling but to my luck the dealership was closing and I left without trading in my left arm for the car.

In such a situation it is important to ask the right questions. If you ask yourself a question your brain will automatically focus on searching the “database” in order to find an answer to the question. This is a good thing as it means you do not need to spend much energy on solving the numerous small “problems” you encounter in your daily life. I think a common and very human thing to do when the desire for a very expensive object is awakened is to ask oneself “How can I afford it?” and the brain will try to figure out a way that makes it possible to afford it. What the brain will not do is try to figure out whether the question that it was asked was the right question to ask, so you must be very cautious, as asking such questions will probably give you answers that involve optimistic forecasts about how big a loan you can take and still have a nice lifestyle; in other words it can lead you astray and straight into debt and misery.

I could probably find a way to borrow enough money that I could actually buy the car I fell in love with, so asking myself “how can I afford this fantastic marvellous car?” will give me a solution that could in fact be used to buy this car; but that is the problem. If I borrowed that much money for an investment as bad as a car, I would not only ruin the graph of my net worth development but also stretch my personal finances to a point where unexpected and expensive events like if the car broke down would cause a serious headache and not just be annoying. That alone would be reason enough not to buy the car, as counterarguments like “you only live once” would not be valid if a future of financial headaches is to be expected – but what is even worse is that even though owning a really nice car (like the BMW) is one of my long term goals, I have other more important long term goals and the limited financial head-room for several years forward would cause a lot of those to be postponed many years into the future. That is a consequence I am not willing to live with and I am fortunate that I started asking the right questions, asking “how can I afford it?” fails to take into account what I would have to give up in order to afford it.

By asking questions in a conscious way and not simply as a response to your desires, and doing it persistently, you can dramatically change the amount of good decisions you make and this in turn has the possibility of changing the quality of your life dramatically. Asking the right questions is very important in all areas of your life and not just regarding finances. For an article with some more examples of ways to rephrase the questions you ask yourself, look at this one by Steve Pavlina.