I suspect many people are also lured into increasing this escape velocity by keeping up with the Joneses together with easy debt. It’s much easier to get rich i

I suspect many people are also lured into increasing this escape velocity by keeping up with the Joneses together with easy debt. It’s much easier to get rich if your assets earn, say, 10% (average index return) instead of losing 10% annually via the credit card interest over “assets” that you don’t own. Especially consumer electronics and cars are surprisingly bad “assets” if you do the math. New phones lose about 20% of value per year. So if you combine that with credit card interest, the return on investment is spectacularly bad.