Here is Part 1 of this two-part series. In it, I focus mostly on the Growth part of the equation
In Part 2, I want to focus on the Smaller portion.
As I said, I used to be an entrepreneur. In my small town, I struggled to generate enough traffic to amount to any significant income. Believing I couldn’t manipulate revenue, I instead focused very carefully on the expense side of the balance sheet.
Later I would see the Netflix shows by the ‘Minimalists’ who described using things and loving people. They were effectively doing the same thing: putting energy into regulating the ‘expenses’, whether actual dollars or energy.
In this Episode, I summarize many of the different expenses we have. I talk about how easy it is to reduce a lot of these. I think many of us suffer from the whole, ‘well, I work hard so I DESERVE this’ kind of thing. According to this excuse, we make ourselves believe that spending more money is going to make us happier.
I know of very few people that illustrate this relationship. Mostly, everyone I KNOW is at least a little less happy than they think they could be.
I believe there is some magic income required to create the luxury of this line of thinking. If you can’t make ends meet, you aren’t going to have the energy to ponder where you might be able to budget more effectively. Many have said this income, for a small family living in the USA, is around $75k annually. It’s probably somewhere between $50k and $100k for most people.
However, there may be a lot of assumptions in this estimate that aren’t true. How would you ever know until you do your personal budget and take a good long look at your needs vs. wants?
Most of us just assume if we have something, we need it. I don’t think this is true nearly as often as we think.
I call this the personal inventory. It is CRITICAL, if we want to live better, to inventory EVERYTHING in our life — at least everything you spend money on in the case of growing smaller. And I’ll bet you $100 you can cut some spending. Probably a lot more than you think.
And for those living below the $50k threshold, I have a lot of ideas. I’m working on it.