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Big hat, no cattle

Perry’s visit to Maryland is preceded by $500,000 worth of ads bashing the Free State, urging companies to come to Texas “when you grow tired of Maryland taxes squeezing every dime out of your business.”

- Gov. O’Malley: Rick Perry is ‘all hat and no cattle’, USAToday.com, September 13, 2013.

2. Big hat, no cattle is an old cowboy saying, popular in Texas, used to describe someone who pretends to be something he is not. In personal finance it describes people who go into debt to buy big homes, fancy clothes, luxury cars, and exotic vacations (big hat items representing the appearance of wealth). All of this spending prevents them from building up any real wealth (the cattle). As evidenced by the quote from the Old Testament above, this is not a new problem.

This life is all about choices and almost all of us have to choose between big hats and cattle. Very few of us have enough money for both. And the order in which we acquire them is important. If we buy the big hat first we will probably never have the cattle. On the other hand, if we work on building up our herd first there is a good chance we can buy the big hat later, if we still desire it.

The lesson from the excellent book The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy, by Thomas J. Stanley and William Danko is that most of the wealthy in America don’t wear very big hats. They budget, control their spending, save, and invest. It is these habits that have allowed them to become wealthy.