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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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This is basically urban legend at this point; "buy borrow die" is a tiny piece of the ultra-wealthy's financial strategy, at least when it comes to the "borrow" part, which is what everyone's focused on:
What's confusing to me is that there must be a reason they're borrowing. When you borrow, you have to pay interest. If you're someone who has a lot of money, why would you pay someone to lend you money? I guess the only thing that makes sense is that they think that whatever makes them rich, say Amazon shares or something, will go up at a rate that beats the interest rate they have to pay for the loan. OTOH, I guess they're not so sure of that that they borrow in order to buy even more Amazon shares.
I assume this means "not to sell all of their appreciated assets", because they do spend a lot of money and it has to come from somewhere.
The reason the rich borrow money is to take advantage of tax loopholes. It's not about being reasonable or what ought to make sense. They are gaming the system, that's it. So, how does it work?
If they have investments in the stock market, then they get taxed when they sell those. So even though the investments are usually going up in value, they don't want to sell too often. But they still need to buy things.
So, where do they get money for living, houses, cars, travel, etc? If they get paid for working a job, their income is taxed a lot, meh. If they sell their stocks, they get taxed a little, meh. But if they get a low-interest loan, that money is not taxed.
And you might say hey, money's gotta be paid back some day. But remember, the goal is to find the loopholes, the places and times where either you don't pay tax or you pay much less tax. And those loopholes are all over the place. In the end, the details are just boring. Most financial scams have just enough moving parts to look amazing, but if you take an hour to figure them out, it's nothing exciting.
Neat doc, thanks for linking. I find this part very sensible in light of what you brought up
That makes sense.. I mean once you're somehow generating millions or more every year in income, no need to borrow at all really. It's making it to that upper tier of income vs. expenses that few reach.
That's the key thing.