Been awhile…then it’s important to identify and explore your time-poverty. It is a contributing cause and effect of your debt, happiness, quality of life and…yes, your consumption habits.
When you’re so busy trying to enhance, maintain or worse, salvage your lifestyle, it can actually be diminished. Working too much—as in 8-10 weeks more annually than most Europeans—is often the culprit. (And why is that?)
Work demands more hours today. No debate there. When employers shed workers so much more is required of so few. But then, there is also that small matter of your spending. You must work longer and run faster to pay your debts and maintain your income than you did last year. Throw in the hunting trips to the mall and those trips to the gas pumps also become much too frequent.
All these activities push you toward convenience for which you pay a premium. Plus... you are spending more today on the basics as inflation erodes your income. And if you are a homeowner or investor watching your asset values decline you respond by working longer and harder to replace your paper losses of wealth.
And yet, for even the successful, happiness is elusive in this culture where our obsession and preoccupation is getting rich. For most folks, this means less time off and fewer, shorter vacations.
All of this leaves you wishing for more; not more money but more down-time, flex-time, and fun time.
Your precious relationships, hobbies, socializing, and community involvement, etc.--the sources of your happiness—get short-changed, perhaps even lost in a time-starved lifestyle. But this can be reversed, sometimes overnight.
Life can be better when you refocus on your dreams and aspirations. It is your passions and progressive realization of your dreams that make you more fully yourself. There is no legacy of regret when you’re investing time ‘on purpose’, on the people and things you can’t put a price on.
And there is a financial dividend, too. How you spend your time impacts how you spend your money. Time spent on what really matters most costs so little. So enjoy. This is the time of your life.
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( 3.1 / 173 )Whether or not the first day of 2008 was the beginning of a recession or not, it should be the end of your focus on what you can't have and can't do. It's time to ignore the negativity and fear mongering. Simply acknowledge the mess greed has incubated and move on.
Here's the first thing to do. It's called the Great Lifestyle Rule of Law. Things that matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least. How difficult can that be?
With good intent, most of us would probably say, "Yeah, I do that." Of course, it may not be top of mind every time you're at the mall. That's when our impulsive and frivolous spending takes an unplanned bite out of the budget. But okay, we'll cut back somewhere else, right.
That's not quite how the rule should work. What really matters most and makes an undeniable value-added contribution to your lifestyle right now AND moves you in the direction of your dream and aspirations is different. Here's the catch. It's always what comes after the 'AND' in the above sentence that makes following this rule such a challenge. It has a long term reach as you aim toward the future you want to have.
The focus must be on your dreams and aspirations and what you're doing to make them a reality. Call it goal setting, lifestyle planning or whatever you like. The point is you can't hit a target you can't see even if its only in your imagination. So anything that obscures or clutters up your picture of the target minimizes the chance of reaching it.
We get a lot of help with the clutter from the 50,000 malls we can visit, advertisers, and the media who bombard us constantly with images of what they want us to dream about and acquire. This commercial litter is dangerous to your dreams and your budget. It's also enviromentally unfriendly to a lifestyle you'll want to sustain once you have it.
Here's a suggestion. Make time to add up the dollars you plan to spend this month on your dreams and aspirations ... what really matters most to you. (I call these my passion absolutes.) You may be surprised by how little that is in the big picture of your overall monthly spending.
If that's what you discover then it's time to refocus on the target. Now, the things that matter most will not be at the mercy of things that matter least.
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