This is a guest article by Outlaw, who lives and works in New York’s financial district and writes on the blog Credit Card Outlaw.

When I first became fascinated with personal finance strategy, I was in serious credit card debt. I couldn’t find full-time work. I felt like an idiot.

Every month, a new credit card statement. Every month, deeper in debt. No rich parents to fall back on, no income, and yet I still had to buy food and pay my rent. Even thinking about money made me sick to my stomach.

I was too smart for this. That’s what I kept telling myself.

Fed up, I began reading everything I could get my hands on. Every blog, including Consumerism Commentary, and every book in the personal finance aisle. I landed a full-time job and started a small business. I drastically slashed my living expenses. Within about three months, something miraculous happened: I was able to pay off the last of my credit cards. I wrote about this experience and how it felt on my blog, and about how getting out of debt shifted my goals.

My goal went from $0.00 (debt free) to around $50,000. I wanted to have $50,000 because I felt that seeing an amount like that in my bank account would give me a tangible level of comfort.

It doesn’t. Sorry to burst your bubble. When you hit $50,000, you simply associate with new people. Or maybe when you hit $100,000. But it’s pretty much a universal law that as you become a bigger fish, you find yourself in a bigger pond — with much bigger fish. If anything, I was happier when I was worth nothing at all.

But building wealth isn’t about happiness. It’s about overcoming the odds. It’s about attaining a level of accomplishment that no person or thing can ever take away from you, save for the grim reaper. Beyond covering your basic needs (food, water, shelter), money has very little correlation to happiness. Not what you wanted to hear, but completely true nonetheless.

Asking about the relationship between money and happiness is like asking whether winning a chess game leads to long-term happiness. You don’t play chess to become happy. You play chess to play chess.

It is a fool’s argument to suggest otherwise. Wealth building is just a game. Once you eliminate the years of negative beliefs about money that others have forced upon you (shame, guilt, fear, envy — our culture does an impressively crap job of preparing us for wealth acquisition), you can start the game in earnest.

Lose all attachment. Look only at the returns, the profit or loss, the overhead. Nothing else matters. Forget vanity projects, forget becoming rich overnight, and forget impressing others. I love personal finance because everything is spelled out. You are either in the black or in the red, wealthy or debtor. There is no ambiguity.

And please, forget about building wealth for your distant future. Until recently, I had been contributing the maximum amount to my 401k at work. What a waste!

Now I contribute nothing.

I’m in great shape, but I have bad genetics: the odds are excellent I will die young from diabetes or heart disease. When you get good with your money, you become good at understanding statistics. And that means looking at things exactly as they are, not as you want them to be or as you wish they were.

For this reason, saving up for some magical fantasy time in my sixties when I can play golf and suck on Werther’s Originals… that doesn’t make sense to me. And what if, against all genetic odds, I survive into my sixties or seventies? I don’t want to be wealthy, with a Life Alert hanging around my neck and a spare pair of dentures in my back pocket. I want to enjoy my prosperity now, while I’m alive and healthy. I would rather be poor at seventy than poor at thirty. That’s just me.

Plus, I don’t like any of the options my employer’s 401k plan offers. I chose the most “aggressive” fund at first, because I’m relatively young and fearless, but then I did my research. I don’t like, don’t understand, or simply don’t trust many of the companies held in the most aggressive fund. Some of them are sloppy organizations, others are in debt, and the rest are just boring dinosaurs with zero growth potential. There is a difference between aggressive and stupid.

So I switched my money into my plan’s most “conservative” fund, which is based primarily on corporate bond offerings. I don’t like how insanely low the returns are, and again, I don’t trust some of the underlying companies: they are debt-ridden dinosaurs. I don’t like the high expense ratio. I don’t like the almost certain possibility that taxes will be higher in the future than they are now — Uncle Sam needs to pay off its debts in some way, eventually.

I would rather take all of my money, less applicable taxes, and put it toward self-improvement, enjoyment, and my small business. Those all yield better proven returns than some obscure aggressive growth fund or fixed-income investment managed by people in skyscrapers whom I have never met or shook hands with. Also, I should not be charged money for the “privilege” of investing in your fund. Sorry, that’s just not how it works.

Those who defend 401k plans say that if you don’t contribute now, you are robbing your future self. Maybe I am. But I would prefer that to the alternative: robbing my present self for a future self that very well may not exist.

You’re alive today. Enjoy your wealth, and invest it yourself, or in yourself. Nobody cares more about your portfolio than you do.

Stop worrying and start playing the game. Wealth won’t buy you a good relationship or better friends. It won’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you more money. And more money buys more money.

Whoever first coined the term “the first million is always the hardest” was a genius. Invest your money now, while it is still worth something, before inflation eats it up or your health deteriorates. Don’t give it to a 401k plan to do with as they please.

And don’t share your plans with other people, unless they are on the same path. Some of my friends resent me when I talk about my wealth building goals, or my small successes so far. So I don’t talk to them about it any more. Let people live in ignorance. There are enough smart people online and in personal finance forums; you don’t need to be getting any financial advice from your friends or family members.

If you diversify, invest in what you know, spend less than you earn, enjoy the present and lose all emotional attachment to money you will succeed. There is no other option.

The rest is just small talk.

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This decade flew by. Ten years ago, I had recently graduated college and had been working for a non-profit arts organization. At this point in my life, I didn’t know it, but I was setting myself up for financial problems. Despite working 80 or more hours a week during the summer and fall, despite living an hour and a half away from the office, despite major personality and philosophical conflicts among the ten employees in the tiny office space, and despite a salary which didn’t cover modest living expense when added to commuting expenses, I enjoyed the work I was doing.

Looking back, it’s probably a good thing the only money I had in the stock market was a few thousand dollars remaining in what had once been a Uniform Transfer to Minors Act (UTMA) account. Although airplanes didn’t mysteriously crash, falling from the sky when the clock struck midnight ushering in the year 2000, the stock market soon plummeted. At this time I was only marginally aware of my finances, but I quickly became a fan of The Motley Fool’s discussion boards, ING Direct, and taking control of my financial future.

The start of the decade was turbulent personally and professionally, but for me, everything that has transpired since the turn of the century has allowed me to grow in all aspects of my life. There is no question that I am in a better spot financially now than I was in December 1999, with a net worth somewhere below zero but not explicitly defined because I remained blissfully ignorant of my negative cash flow. Professionally, most of my income now comes from what I do outside my day job, and barring signs that my future plans will not be profitable, I plan on leaving that day job within the next few months.

For those who were just graduating college ten years ago or so, as I was, chances are life is better now than it was in 1999. I have to wonder if any other age groups feel the same way, however. Someone close to retirement today might have seen barely any financial growth overall over the past ten years, and some might even have a loss. The unemployment rate is still high, so there are likely many people who have been out of work for over a year or who have accepted jobs paying a fraction of the salary they once commanded.

How has this decade been for you? Are you better off at the end of 2009 than you were at the end of 1999?

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