People aren’t rich because they don’t do the math.
That’s been the lesson, again and again. Not bad luck. Not bad timing. Not bad genes. Just numbers, left unfinished.
You’re taught it backwards from childhood. Saving is virtue. Debt is vice. The bank exists to hold your money, not to lend you theirs. So you spend your life making financial decisions on instinct, on fear, on habits inherited from people whose balance sheets were never large enough for those habits to matter.
Then one day you sit down with a blank sheet and you run the numbers.
And you find out the difference between making it and not making it doesn’t live in your salary, your inheritance, or your timing. It lives in whether you can read a rate table.
Concrete example. The one sitting on my desk this week.
You hold €100k in pledgeable assets. The bank offers you two scenarios.
Scenario A: borrow €50k at 3.5%.
Scenario B: borrow €100k at 4.5%.
The maximum drawdown the bank requires is the same in both cases. If the collateral …
