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277 points cebert | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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PostOnce ◴[] No.44361768[source]
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

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1. JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.44369775[source]
> Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

Credit moves money across time. That’s it. (Analogous to paying a shipper to move stuff across space.)

Not all consumptive debt is bad.(And not all consumptive loans are wealth destroying. I opted to borrow when I bought my car because the rate was so much lower than what I figured I could earn with the money.) And not all cash-flow positive wealth is good.

We should be more scrutinising about how debt is used. But especially for folks with volatile incomes, accumulating debt for consumption is fine as long as it doesn’t snowball.