Changing Expectations

I remember when I was a little kid, before I knew that everything was not possible; I remember sitting on the steps in front of my house with my friends looking at all the cars cruising by. It was one of our favorite summer evening past times. I grew up in the 80's, when Cadillacs and Lincolns with shiny chrome bumpers and miles of hood and trunk dominated the streets of Philadelphia. My friends and I would sit on the hot concrete steps sticky with ice cream and stinky with that peculiar little kid smell of sweat and street grime that meant we had been playing outside all day. We would point when a nice looking what we considered fancy car would come down the street, and some one of us would yell "that's my car". That meant, one day when we were all grown up, we would drive a fancy car just like the ones that cruised down our block. Even I, this visually impaired kid, though I didn't really know what that mean at the time. To all my friends, I was just "half blind". Even I would dream about being behind the wheel of a big Cadi, slowly cruising down the block, smiling at all the little kids, knowing that right then, what they wanted the most was to be in my seat.

As a kid, I nor any of my friends, had any idea what it meant to be wealthy. We did know that if you had nice cars and big gold chains you had money. And since none of the people we knew had either of those things, we inferred that we were not wealthy. Now, as a little kid this situation wasn't really a problem, as we only really wanted small things. I was partial to candy, and my idea of wealth was limited to a great bulging bag of assorted candies. To me, a dollar meant I was rich. And if I had a dollar, and my friend Pooh had a dollar, well hell, you could find us at the candy store deep in little kid concentration, parceling out the candy for maximum consumption.

Now that I am clearly no longer a kid, I have to come up some real concrete concepts as to what is wealth. It seems that the world of asset building, and financial management have some rather specific ideas as to what wealth is. I am on a path that could potentially change my life in a very significant way. Stay with me as I begin to reconcile my income, wealth ideas, and asset building with my own perceptions of that are colored by my race, class and expectations. It will be a real trip.

Brandon