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Income, and how you view income, separates the
1 from the 99 every time. We all know that it takes
some portion of your income to live. That’s a given.
So let’s agree to subtract survival necessities from
the equation. It’s what you do with the rest that is of
concern for this particular conversation.
What is the di!erence between discretionary
income and disposable income?
The former implies some sort of thoughtfulness
about how, where, when, why and what you use the
money for. They latter implies the ability to use or
get rid of (without thought or reason), and to some
measure waste, the money. To be fair, let’s de#ne the
words discretionary and disposable and compare
the two. The New Heritage Dictionary de#nes
Discretionary as: left to or regulated by one’s own
discretion or judgement. Disposable is
de#ned as: (1) designed
to be disposed of after use.
(2) subject to use; available.
The distinction speaks for
itself. Discretion is the use
of judgement (hopefully
good judgement) while
disposable connotes
availability and waste.
A simple look at the American
money philosophy answers the question of
what the 1%’ers have that the
rest don’t: the mind to exercise discretion over
the how, where, when, why,
and what they use their income for.
Culturally, our collective money mind conscious has
been geared toward, tuned, and set on autopilot to
believe that our extra income is disposable.
It’s not!
Until we change our collective view on income and
what it means to us, we will continue to see the
economic gap grow far and wide. Eventually, we will
be able to measure it in terms of one side to the
other of the Grand Canyon length, width, and depth.
Unless you open your mind to the idea of “my extra
income is discretionary income for me to use to
secure my !nancial future”, you will stay in the 99
for your whole lifetime and those of your future
generations. It’s not necessary to question what the
wealthy do if you refuse to make thatconscious mind change #rst. Although consumerism
is a contributing factor in the well-de#ned distinc-
tion between the 99 and the 1, the over-arching evil
is not consumerism at all—it’s money illiteracy.GETMONEYMAGAZINE.COM 23