Envy of other people's spending

I found "Keeping Up with the Joneses Can Put You Behind" by Laura Rowley to be indicative of today's problem of too much debt: You see your friends and neighbors buying and spending on things more than you. So you want to do the same. Most of us don't have the money to do it in cash so we turn to financing, i.e., debt. And we dig ourselves a little bit deeper for every time we turn to credit rather than savings. However, as the book "The Millionaire Next Door" points out, it's not how much you make and spend but how much you don't spend that makes you a millionaire [buy used goods, live below one's means, save money and invest]. So this envy and spending doesn't do a person any good in the long term. In fact, the Bible puts this very issue in straightforward terms:

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Exodus 20:17

Here you see the simple principle in being worry free and the first step on the path to riches: don't covet.

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