Where China has the USA beat!

so where does China have the West beat it's pretty simple and it's got to do with debt when we grew up in the West we're told by our parents our teachers and society around us movies TV shows that anything is possible that you as long as you put your mind to something can achieve whatever you want you can be an astronaut to be a firefighter you can be a millionaire you can be the next Bill Gates you could be the president of Australia or America or wherever you are from we're taught this from a very young age and it's actually not true but of course it's always nice to dream the problem with this is that it instills in us this sort of idea that we deserve good things in life so when you become a young adult you look around you and you see things like your we're colleagues your friends your parents perhaps all driving nice cars and wearing nice clothes and so you think to yourself well they have it I deserve it too you know maybe my million hasn't come along yet maybe I'm just not successful enough yet but there's no reason why I shouldn't have a nice car so what do you do well you go out to the bank and you get a finance so you loan finance for your car and you end up paying off some piece-of-crap car for the next ten or fifteen years even 20 some people I don't know it's kind of crazy people also do things like oh I need some jeans well I'm not gonna go down to Walmart I deserve the best I'm gonna go get myself some Levi's or whatever it is that are designer jeans these days you know so instead of spending 20 bucks you spend like 200 bucks on a pair of jeans but you get it on credit now the West is very well kitted out for credit pretty much everywhere you go any shop you visit they're more than happy to sell you or assign your work for their own in-store credit card or some kind of a club card where they extend credit to you and of course they earn money off of the interest at the end of the month when you don't pay it back on time this is all really kind of discussing sort of a setup I have to say I've always been appalled by this my entire life have been kind of lucky that personally I until very recently anyway I never owned a credit card I just refused it meant that I always had crap things I always drove rubbish cars and things like that but it's because I refused to ever let myself get into debt I however did not escape this whole idea of having to have something which I couldn't afford and so what I would do is I would you know go to the bank of mom and dad and ask them to lend me a little money or go to my friends and say hey can you lend me 200 bucks till the end of the month I'll pay you back that kind of thing so I found myself in a similar situation and that is this kind of hand-to-mouth living you know end of the month you have to pay everybody off that you borrowed money from most of my friends yeah they've got the newest PlayStation and they've got a nice car to drive and they got some nice clothes but every single paycheck goes to everything and at the end of the day every month they only have a few hundred bucks to spend you know something very small not even enough to really enjoy themselves or buy anything of any significance this is something that China on the other hand gets right and that is saving actually to a fault we'll talk about that in a minute but I was quite surprised when I first got to China 14 and a half years ago when I arrived in China you know I met people from all different castes of life I met people from the very low end people like here's sort of street sweepers Busboys at restaurants you know I've got no preference when it comes to making friends so when I was you know in the early days exploring not being able to speak any real Chinese a few little phrases here and there I would just speak to everyone and anyone that I could and I made some pretty good friends along the way from all different walks of life you know from billionaires and millionaires all the way down to street sweepers and one thing that kind of blew me away was that the very very low end people and I mean low end not as in that the people are loved but on the actual social status spectrum the very lower in people always had a lot more money saved up than I did and I considered myself to be you know fairly middle-class you know I had my own business back in South Africa an IT business called resolution dynamics was fairly successful I could afford to pay myself in a salary of two other people and we to go around fixing networks and computers and stuff so you know I was used to kind of being fairly in a fairly respectable position in society somewhere in the middle not rich but not poor somewhere in the middle but when I got to China I was humbled by the fact that people that I would expect to be slow as well not slightly quite a lot lower on the social spectrum than I was had more money in the bank and buy more money I mean like lots of money and this is something that's come about because of all the instability in China's past not just in the recent past but actually quite a way back into the past China has gone through a lot of turmoil there's been famine starvation incredibly widespread poverty you know the disaster of the cultural devolution in the great leap backwards so as a result of this people have learned to save money for a rainy day because let's face it if most of the days of the year are a rainy day you need to make sure that you have a lot of money stashed away the Chinese people that I know family and otherwise are all actually very frugal these are of course not the food eyes and the sort of rich kids that go and splash money around and buy stupid things like Ferraris and Lamborghinis for their girlfriends and a million iPhones or whatever I'm talking about your average Chinese person they're incredibly frugal so they're very good at finding bargains discounts things like that they end up saving probably 60 to 80 percent of their salary and just spending money on the very basics that they need in order to survive and to make it to the next month etc etc this was a very very big life lesson for me because although personally I never got into any serious debt I still had that Western mindset of oh I can get something that I can't really afford however living in China has taught me that saving money up for something like if I if I want to buy a nice car for instance instead of getting a loan to buy this nice car if I actually saved up my money and was able to go down and buy that car cash it is so much more satisfying than basically buying it on credit because that instant gratification weighs up very quickly when you have it actually earned it you know it's just one of those things to try for yourself next time you want to buy something save up for it when you with cash you will feel so much more satisfied and it will mean so much more to you than something that you just quickly bought with your credit card and are paying off over the next 24 months you know this goes with everything in life this goes with service as well I learned a long time ago because I've always been good with computers that people would ask me to fix their computers and I would always just do it straight away you know it doesn't matter who friends family friends or friends there be like this guy knows computers just give him a call they'd phoned me up and say hey I got this wrong that wrong like okay bring it around I'll fix it I'd fix it for free and then I realized that by doing that I was not putting any value to my work in other words that would you give away for free is worthless so when I actually started my company and started to charge people for these services of course there were a lot of people that were like why why should I pay you you know you could just fix us it's really easy for you I was like okay fine then find somebody else that you know will fix it for you for free and after a while people started to realize that there was a lot of value in what I did kind of ties into the whole thing but I don't want to get sidetracked here let's get back to the whole China thing I would like all of you out there Chinese people included to learn from China's past and this very good culture of saving because it's going out of the window people are changing in China things have changed you know China recently has gotten more into this whole sort of capitalist idea buying fancy clothes buying you know sort of luxury brands but specifically this crazy crazy housing market where people are speculating buying multiple properties and sitting on them and then selling them again buying more and sitting on them and selling them because what happens is it's no longer become a thing of buy what you can afford and invest what you can afford it's like well I want to invest more so what do I do I go to the bank and I take a loan so I can buy more properties I go to shadow banks and loan sharks to get money I go to family to get money and I invested in more and more and more things so what's happening in China is this whole sort of debt thing that the West has is starting to rear its ugly head but at a supercharged rate it's so different to what it used to be when I first got to China back in 2006 everybody had money almost nobody was in debt now in China right now almost everybody has debt and it's all related to these silly investments like property and the stock market and peer-to-peer lending and stuff stop guys stop it's bad for you okay if you're Chinese right now if you've got all this kind of debt go back to the way you were it's so much better than what we've got in the West trust me on this and if you're Western take a page out of these guys books because they know what they're doing you can live a much better quality of life if you don't have a burden of debt on your shoulders and I understand how difficult it is you know the reason there's a green screen behind me right now they're switching it off so you can see see there's actual green screen let's go back to the footage the reason there's a green screen behind me right now is that I'm currently traveling back and forth between China and LA because see mark and myself have set up an office in LA for us to pursue pursue bigger projects when it comes to a TV China and stuff traveling to India and traveling all over Asia going to different places so we needed a solid base to work from so and back and forth in and out of China and since my wife is pregnant right now I know how incredibly expensive things like medical costs medical insurance and stuff are in the States so I understand why people do get into debt especially when it comes to medical stuff but if you can avoid it I'd say that the most valuable lesson that I learned from China is don't live beyond your means make sure that you have enough and then buy whatever it is you want to buy it's changed my life for the better and I know to change your life for the better anyway I hope you enjoyed the video guys can't wait to see you in the next one and as always don't forget every single what is it Friday yeah it's Friday you can see my videos every Friday sorry get confused with this too but Friday's for serpent's at a wednesdays for lao 86 monday most important sambal muddled again monday is a TV China that's definitely the most important please go check it out awesome stuff adventures around the world that's where we're moving all the stuff we want people to see what it's like not only in China Taiwan Vietnam South Korea Japan India all these places we've got everything lined up go check it out and if you got time check out our podcast - anyway until next time you know the drill as always stay awesome

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Views: 194,331

Rating: 4.7596097 out of 5

Keywords: china how it is, life in china, living in china, winston sterzel, chinese people, chinese girl, china (country), living in china as a foreigner, chinese culture, China debt, china debt trap explained, China debt clock, China debt crisis 2019, debt, china economy, stock market, chinese economy, debt in china, america debt to china, america debt, national debt, personal debt, america's debt prolem, usa debt, us debt crisis, america credit card debt, serpentza, serpent za

Id: uJFtpnDmYdU

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019