Lifestyle.....

The other day I was discussing with one of my friend and we started talking about afford ability.

He had absolute number (well he is a financial and risk Management Analyst) like a person having x salary should be able to afford a house of around 4.5x cost. We had a lengthy discussion on the numbers etc and how it is being calculated.

But now when I look back at it I think the whole concept of afford ability is relative. You can see people with the same salary having a different life style, driving different kind of cars and so on.

I think the lifestyle can be attributed to certain personal traits...like Family upbringing and impact of that upbringing, personal constraints like earnings and responsibilities, passion and risk taking capabilities etc.

I have been watching a lot of people and thinking how they analyze afford ability of certain thing. My realizations is afford ability is a concept, which people try to apply on day to day expenditure, long term investments, big expense items but avoid to consider it when human emotions like passion, love, envy are involved.

I guess I need to analyze more and understand in deep how people spend, what are those things which tick people to consider something as affordable or not...!!
If you have some interesting theory or observation, let me know.