You can't put your Christmas tree in a Porsche to take it to the dump.
You can't fit your cases in it to go to the airport on holiday, not for a proper holiday with proper cases. They say you can drive a Porsche every day, but you can't. Not every day. Not unless your everyday is just driving to work and back with your lunch in a Tupperware box.
This little blog is a metaphor, not in any way related to Porsches. I'm not in any way judging anyone who buys a Porsche. If you've never been to the Campbell Clinic, you'll know that we have the massive Nottingham Porsche dealership about 100 yards up the road.
What I'm interested in, in this little piece of writing and more and more, his attitudes to money, by all of us, everyone, society.
The time when you should buy a Porsche is when you have all the money you ever need for the rest of your life, secured away so that it's impossible to lose it, so that you know you're solid, and you can go on, and you have extra, and you spend it on the thing that you want.
Until that point, you shouldn't buy anything like a Porsche, because the problem is that finances go up and they go down, and it happens in a cycle, and it always has, and until the world ends (which could be a week on Tuesday), they always will.
People that I know who understand money call this leverage, and they talk about people being ‘overgeared’. These are people who borrow money to try to make money or borrow money to try to buy things that they don't yet have enough money to buy, and then the interest rates go up, or the economy falls, or the business flounders.
Almost 6 years ago, we had the opening evening for the new Campbell Clinic.
It was the 11th of March 2020, in the big surgery that we call treatment room 6, I was standing at one point that evening with my bank manager. He told me the following: “You know, Colin, that in a crisis, Cash is King”.
He knew I never had any cash of any kind, perhaps only when you go to the wire, or so close to the wire that it's almost unmeasurable, can you understand what over-geared is, what leverage is, what money is for.
The other aspect of this little blog is that financial dysphoria is a thing.
When people get poorer, they feel they're poorer. And when Millionaires see the stock market go down, they stop giving to charity. Even if you think you have all the money you ever need. When the market goes down, you might feel poorer.
The time to buy a Porsche is when you have more money than you could ever want.
Almost nobody gets more money than they could ever want.
Blog Post Number - 4374
Colin Campbell, Chris Barrow, and an intrepid group of dentists will be cycling across the plains of Tanzania from Kilimanjaro in early February 2026. If you would like to support the charity, Bridge to Aid, and this extraordinary challenge, please click here.
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