The term investment, with regard to money, properly refers to something that has a good chance of increasing in value. When you invest, that is your intention: to build capital. Take a house or a business, your stocks and mutual funds, those silver galleons you stashed under the mattress. These are all investments. A car, on the other hand, is not an investment. Neither are clothes. You are not going to invest in some new clothes for the fall, you are simply going to purchase them. There goes your cash, and as soon as you rip off the tags, the clothes are worth less.

Not even something that will save you money is rightly called an investment. Buying a churn so you can make your own butter may save you money (if not time), but the churn does not itself increase in value, so the word investment doesn’t apply. Perhaps, even in our undeniably consumer culture, we don’t like to admit how often we are simply spending money. Do we use the term so loosely and frequently to avoid facing the fact that we are continually buying more stuff and have little to show for it?