Stacking and owning for life

My wife is on the job hunt at the moment, but being summer, it is slim pickings as pretty much Finland is closed for between 4-6 weeks while everyone is on vacation. However, she does have a pretty decent network so there are some leads out there to chase.

I was saying to her tonight that regardless of what she does and what she earns, for the next 6 months to a year we are going to keep the status quo on our spending - meaning that we are going to keep saving what we can - just at a faster rate. She is fine with that because she has lived this life for long enough also and is tired of the razors edge that slices from time to time and the worry if something big comes up, as has arrived a few times in the recent past. Of course, we are not extreme about these things and still attempt to do something together as a family that is nice, splurge a little, even if it is just on trip for ice cream.

I was talking with a colleague today about investing, something he is into also but doesn't spend much time on and plays it very safe in his opinion, and he was talking about how pretty much anyone could be saving a little extra here or there.

One of the things that surprises me at time is that saving is the general go to for wealth creation, but I think it is at least partly flawed. While saving is great, wealth creation requires making money and if one is not making enough at this point, saving is going to be not only difficult and highly restrictive, it is also going to be unlikely to be able to realize the kinds of results needed.

Needed.

How much do you need? How much do I need? How long is a piece of string? You know, it is all relative but, in my view the wish would be to have choices, not in what to buy but in what I am able to do for work. Being forced to work due to necessity makes any job, no matter how good, soul-sucking.

What I asked him was what he would think if while he was grocery shopping, he saw me stocking shelves with cans. His answer was that he would likely think that I was in need of the money - but he would only be partly right.

An average job in Finland pays about 3000€ a month - stacking shelves 15 hours a week would add about 600€ to that total - essentially a 20% raise in income. But while most don't want to add 60 hours a month to their working lives, stacking shelves is quite mindless work, requires near zero training and provides time to think about whatever one chooses. For example, one could spend that time thinking about where to invest 600€ a month.

Over the space of 2 years, that would be 14,000€ extra that could go into an investment portfolio of some kind and if started early enough, spread well and into some decent investing points, could add a significant amount in a final tally. How much could it add?

Well imagine being able to get 10% a year on it.

• Year 1 - 15,400
• Year 5 - 22,500
• Year 10 - 36,400
• Year 20 - 94,100
• Year 30 - 244,200

Sure, there are various forms of risk and inflation to consider but, that is not bad for 2 years of part-time brainless labor stacking shelves. I would be 70 years old in 30 years from now my house would be paid off, child out of the house long ago - pity I didn't do this when I was 20. Small amounts can add up to large amounts very fast if they are invested well.

People like safe investments with their income. I will let you in on a secret to the safest investment to stock your portfolio with. Consumables. They will yield zero nearly every time. But you can feel good owning them until they are torn and tattered, breaking down and leaking oil - or your neighbor has a newer version.

2 years of stacking shelves as an extra job and a half decent retirement fund is very possible - but there is the investment part and increases in lifestyle don't count as investments for the most part.

They shouldn't call it lifestyle at all because, you can't buy style. They should call it lifefashion. the phones, the sneakers, the trendy coffees, the subscriptions to content distributors. These things are fashion-based and add very little to life.

Are they a good use of 600€ a month?

These are the decisions we each make. Someone might spend it on this and that, another might buy 3000 Steem with it. Economics is very much a game that we all are forced to play, but how we play has many variables and the decisions we make can lead to many outcomes. There is one thing that I can't stress enough though, material wealth can only come through ownership of some kind because,

you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Do you understand that idiom yet? You can't hold and consume simultaneously.

Well, unless what you hold is Steem ;)

Going back to my colleague seeing me stocking shelves thinking about me needing the money, he would be right - I would need it. I would need it to invest so that in some time further from those shelves, I wouldn't need the job, I would get residual earnings from the investments made. Then, I have other choices.

While not everyone in this world has access to jobs, let alone second jobs - most people in this world do. It is interesting to hear so many people complain about what they can't have or can't do rather than working out what they can do - and then doing it.

I may have been one of them once, I might still be one of them from time to time now, but I am slowly breaking the patterns of self-repression and moving into self-expression and ownership of my own experience.

There are opportunities to own everywhere, whether it be through stacking shelves or blogging on a blockchain.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]