The hardest part for me was convincing my partner that price is not equal to value. It took me a decade of arguments and constant proofs to even begin to convin

The hardest part for me was convincing my partner that price is not equal to value. It took me a decade of arguments and constant proofs to even begin to convince my partner that you can almost always find much better value for much less money. Marketing does such an incredible job at convincing people that price and value are the same thing that it takes tremendous mental effort for people to acknowledge that it's not like that at all. People refuse to acknowledge how powerful advertising is at distorting our own perceptions. People think things like "I'm not that kind of person to use product x or drive car y or live in country z, I'm better than that" - These people are misguided. Usually you have to move to a different country to get better value. You don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood next to money launderers who get easy money (you don't want your hard-earned money competing on the same playing field as their big easy-earned money). You want to buy a house somewhere where people work hard for their money. Sometimes these places don't have a very good reputation but the reality often has nothing to do with the marketing. People also get caught up in group think. I was saying for years that the best value real estate was outside of big cities including in the surrounding areas. Nobody agreed with me, I often heard arguments like "We don't want to live next to the kinds of people who live there." The great irony is that "these people" are probably the best kinds when you judge them based on their character and personal values. Again, this is due to people confusing price with value. They think that people who earn a lot of money are better people, smarter people but there is no correlation - They are just lucky people with huge egos; in many ways they are more primitive. Since the pandemic now all the rich suckers suddenly decided all at once that they want to live outside the cities... I'm thinking to move even further out.