Abundance, Your Distant Cousin
Now that the summer is here, it is officially grilling season. It means the smell of wood smoke and charcoal wafting through neighborhoods, cold beers, and lots of family—especially extended family. Most of them you’ve seen a few times a year going to back decades, and just about all of them are kind, strait-laced, and perhaps a little boring.
Then there is the distant cousin who only shows up every few years. This is the person who has oozed cool since you were a kid. They’ve always traveled to cool places, done cool things, and known cool people. “Oh, you’re into that band?” they once asked as they glanced down to the shirt you were wearing. “Yeah, I used to date the bassist.”
This cousin is Abundance. As much as you idolize them, you struggle to spend more than a few moments with them, let alone be anything like them. Instead, you find yourself more likely to be stuck with Scarcity, the stodgy cousin who follows you around every family gathering like a puppy. More than just being a buzzkill, Scarcity tends to keep you from talking with Abundance, from taking chances, and from thinking about new opportunities.
The Scarcity Mindset and the Abundance Mindset
Everyone alternates between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset. When you have a scarcity mindset, your horizons shrink. You conserve your resources and avoid risks. You get comfortable.
“Scarcity is the low-hanging fruit,” Tom says. While most people agree that one should hope for the best and prepare for the worst, getting stuck in a scarcity mindset can mean being so focused on preparing for the worst that you never have time to appreciate the present. Whether it’s because you’re too worried about the latest crisis to dominate the news cycle or because you’re hedging your bets due to pessimistic economic forecasts, what this translates into is a lack of movement. You stay still because movement means using resources.
Contrary to this is the abundance mindset. With an abundance mindset, your horizons grow. You expend your resources and take chances. You support small businesses by going out to eat and help the local economy by starting a new business. “What’s central to the idea of abundance is the idea of movement,” Tom says. “Movement makes abundance.”
What This Means for Real Estate
For Tom, the relationship between these two mindsets and real estate is clear: Get moving!
For overly cautious buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines, now is the time to embrace the abundance mindset. Housing and land may seem expensive by yesterday’s standards, but today’s prices will seem exceptionally reasonable if you wait another five years to make a move. Even if there are dips in the market in the short-term, the long-term trajectory of the real estate market has been steadily climbing upward for decades.
For sellers, now is also the time to act. The market is exceptionally hot right now and selling, especially in a prime area, means you can take the proceeds of the sale and do something new and exciting with it. By taking a page out of Abundance’s playbook, you can either get in on the ground floor of something new, reinvest it in another property, or go enjoy the fruits of your investment.