You Finance Everything You Buy
There's no such thing as "paying cash." Every purchase has a financing cost — visible or hidden.
From Becoming Your Own Banker, Chapter 5
One of the most eye-opening ideas in IBC is that you finance everything you buy. There are no exceptions. Even when you pay cash, you give up the interest or growth that money could have earned — what economists call opportunity cost.
Nash illustrates this with the corporate finance concept of Economic Value Added (EVA). Every dollar deployed has a cost — either the interest paid to borrow it, or the return sacrificed by using it. There is no free use of money.
A $30,000 car purchased with cash isn't "free" — it cost you whatever that $30,000 would have earned over the next 20 or 30 years of compounding. Once you internalize this, the question shifts from "cash or finance?" to "how do I keep my money working even when I spend it?"