One of the biggest problems I've had with my new lifestyle and life change is what to do while I'm waiting. What do I do with my time while I wait to go on vacation? Or buy season tickets for a baseball game? Or buy my niece an iPad for college?
This thinking led me to realize that there is really more to becoming debt free or financially independent than just paying one's bills on time. Being aware of one's money, how it's used, and who it goes to is like a meditative practice. It forces you to levels of heightened awareness. For example, in buying a pair of shoes, you have to stop yourself and say, "Is what I'm about to buy a true need or a want?" The very act of thinking before you buy or, to borrow from another phrase, looking before you leap, draws us into awareness about what our motives are for buying things and causes us always to seek the truth in our financial actions.
What I find is that as I separate the wants from the needs, I find myself realizing that I don't really need all that much. So, whereas with an impulse some might be inclined to buy just anything that catches their eye, I wouldn't because it doesn't fit into my values or my goals for becoming debt free.
So what happens is all that time that was spent in the past doing idle things, like window shopping or buying things out of boredom, begins to go by the wayside. The energy that was left to engaging in those things is now in need of someplace else to go or something else to do.
When trying to become debt-free or even after they've become debt-free, some people turn to home economics to fill this energy gap. They grow their own food. They start canning. They learn to sew. They take up some sort of hobby that fills the gap between excess and fulfilling a need. Most people like this do not need to grow their own food to survive. They do not need to sew their own clothes. Even under the guise of simply saving money, activities like these fall short because there are so many other healthful, fast, cost-effective ways to save money and still get food for one's family or put clothes on their back. A simple look at the opportunity costs versus the financial costs of these activities illustrates this point.
Let's say it takes someone 20 minutes to look through a newspaper to find all the stores within a 5-mile radius with sales on fruits and vegetables. Then let's say it takes 3 hours of yard work on average to grow the same amount of vegetables you might buy from the store. On the one hand, growing the vegetables might be a bit cheaper, but on the other hand, buying the vegetables is faster and likely more convenient. The extra 2.5 hours you spend digging in the ground for a tomato could have instead been spent on taking the kids to the park, going to the gym, or reading your favorite blog (which I hope one day will be Simplify and Prosper). That's opportunity cost in a nutshell.
What drives people to make these choices is the need to exhaust the energy that was once used spending money and instead use it something for else. What that something else is can be a confounding question.
What else besides home economics do you do to replace the time and energy you spent spending money? How do you occupy your time while you wait to be debt free?
This thinking led me to realize that there is really more to becoming debt free or financially independent than just paying one's bills on time. Being aware of one's money, how it's used, and who it goes to is like a meditative practice. It forces you to levels of heightened awareness. For example, in buying a pair of shoes, you have to stop yourself and say, "Is what I'm about to buy a true need or a want?" The very act of thinking before you buy or, to borrow from another phrase, looking before you leap, draws us into awareness about what our motives are for buying things and causes us always to seek the truth in our financial actions.
What I find is that as I separate the wants from the needs, I find myself realizing that I don't really need all that much. So, whereas with an impulse some might be inclined to buy just anything that catches their eye, I wouldn't because it doesn't fit into my values or my goals for becoming debt free.
So what happens is all that time that was spent in the past doing idle things, like window shopping or buying things out of boredom, begins to go by the wayside. The energy that was left to engaging in those things is now in need of someplace else to go or something else to do.
When trying to become debt-free or even after they've become debt-free, some people turn to home economics to fill this energy gap. They grow their own food. They start canning. They learn to sew. They take up some sort of hobby that fills the gap between excess and fulfilling a need. Most people like this do not need to grow their own food to survive. They do not need to sew their own clothes. Even under the guise of simply saving money, activities like these fall short because there are so many other healthful, fast, cost-effective ways to save money and still get food for one's family or put clothes on their back. A simple look at the opportunity costs versus the financial costs of these activities illustrates this point.
Let's say it takes someone 20 minutes to look through a newspaper to find all the stores within a 5-mile radius with sales on fruits and vegetables. Then let's say it takes 3 hours of yard work on average to grow the same amount of vegetables you might buy from the store. On the one hand, growing the vegetables might be a bit cheaper, but on the other hand, buying the vegetables is faster and likely more convenient. The extra 2.5 hours you spend digging in the ground for a tomato could have instead been spent on taking the kids to the park, going to the gym, or reading your favorite blog (which I hope one day will be Simplify and Prosper). That's opportunity cost in a nutshell.
What drives people to make these choices is the need to exhaust the energy that was once used spending money and instead use it something for else. What that something else is can be a confounding question.
What else besides home economics do you do to replace the time and energy you spent spending money? How do you occupy your time while you wait to be debt free?
