The Origins of Seven Paths
Years ago, out cycling, Gary Byrne and his friend Richard passed a man panhandling and smoking. They asked themselves, “What’s the cost of cigarettes, and what could that money be worth if it were invested instead?” In bankers’ terms, what was the capitalized value of smoking? The point wasn’t to start yet another campaign against tobacco itself, but to consider the long-term monetary effects of small, habitual spending that isn’t adding value to people’s lives, but is instead undermining their financial security.
With this question as his frame of reference, Gary could see the merging of Consumer Age and the Information Age during a time flush with cash. Soon, selling retail goods and services by means of easy credit, no-holds-barred marketing, the Internet, and all media would create countless avenues for spending. The public could “shop non-stop” in an endless pursuit of material indulgence, and Gary saw this as society’s fiscal undoing.
Conception and Execution
Gary wanted to educate people on how this “freedom to spend,” once unleashed, would undermine their financial lives. He wanted to write a book about it, but his family, public service, and professional life simply didn’t allow him to get a book started, much less completed.
We met in 2006 and joined forces to create Seven Paths, with a clear vision from the start: a book written in everyday language to explore how people lost control of their financial lives through spending patterns controlled not by the buyers, but by the marketers, using methods that disconnect people’s brains from their purchases. Our purpose would be to reestablish that connection, to get people to THINK about how they spend.
Our Motivation Behind Seven Paths
Society’s well-being is based on the well-being of individuals. And the well-being of every individual is tied to that of everyone else. So, what’s good for all savers and investors — that is, the financial health of individual citizens — is good for the financial health of the entire society.
For us, if Seven Paths to Poverty helps create beneficial financial change for 1% of the societies it reaches, millions of people’s lives will be changed for the better, and we will have accomplished everything we aimed for.
