One of my co-workers (about 30yo) told me this: "When you are young, being in debt is bad; but after you're 50 or 60, debt is good! When you're that old, you can spend as much as you want on stuff, make the minimum payment every month, and then buy more stuff to run the balance back up. Why should you care? You'll get old and die without ever having to pay back what you borrowed! A young person can't do that." He was totally serious and really believed what he was saying.
A group of us were discussing what we'd do if we won the lottery ($40-million). One co-worker who had never made more than $20k/year in his life said that he'd use the $40-million to buy rental houses so he'd have enough income to quit working.
FWIW, my own answer to the lottery question was: "If they took half of it for taxes ($20-million) and I spent $200,000 a year, the money would last 100 years; so I guess I'd have to give most of it away." None of my co-workers thought that was a good idea!
Not money-related, but typical of the dumb stuff that gets passed off as wisdom nowadays: On the TV show 'Num3ers' the character who is suposed to be a total mathmatical genius poses a question to his class:
"I have three doors. There is money behind one of them and a goat behind the other two. Pick a door." Two students pick two different doors, and he opens one to show that it is a goat. Then he asks to the other student if they want to exchange their door for the one neither of them picked and if doing so would make any difference in the odds of them winning. The class concensus is that it would make no difference, but the 'professor' explains that it would because when they first chose that door the odds of choosing the correct door were only one-in-three, but now that there are only two doors left the odds of picking the right door are 50-50... "so if you switch doors now, the odds are higher that your new choice will be right!"
The logic of that scene is so bad that even a gradeschool kid ought to see through it, but aparently neither the scriptwriters, not the actors, nor the "mathmatical consultant" listed in the credits at the end of the show realized that having a 50-50 chance of the money being behind the unpicked door means there is also a 50-50 chance that it's behind the door they already chose!
Things like that make me talk to the TV set loudly. So does "Deal or No Deal" -- A glaring advertisment if there ever was one for the fact that average people don't understand odds and/or are insanely greedy. I'm using the word 'insane' on purpose. When the banker is offering $40,000 and 4 of the 5 amounts left on the board are less than $20,000; and momma and poppa and girlfriend and best buddy and the entire audience is yelling "Take the $40,000"; but the contestant just
has to open one more suitcase in hopes of getting a better offer.... That is 'insane greed' IMO, and yet that scene and other similar ones played out several times in the episodes I watched of 'Deal or No Deal'. I kept tuning in night after night until I couldn't stand to watch it any more, just because I just couldn't believe what I was seeing on the screen!