Money should buy peace before pleasure.
https://pixabay.com/photos/money-coin-investment-business-2724241/
40% Less.
As I’ve posted previously, for more than 3 years, we've been pushing down our expenses, eliminating frivolous spending (we had a huge spending problem 3 years ago).
We just broke 40%, 41.41% actually...meaning we spent 41.41% less this month (on a 6 month moving average) than we did at our old house in Nov 2016. We bought a new house in Dec 2016. We live in a better area at a 40% discount.
We busted our ass to get this point. It was a day-by-day; month-by-month grueling process. Especially initially. And it wasn't arithmetic that got us here, it was discipline. We grabbed our budget by the reins and held ourselves accountable. We didn’t throw up our hands and play the victim or catch a huge case of moral hazard. We concentrated on peace, before pleasure.
Peace, before pleasure.
Benjamin Franklin said:
“Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.”
This update is to stress that spending less can give you a better quality of life. Some conventional knowledge states that one of money’s primary purpose is to buy pleasure and things, it's not! Money is most effective when it’s used to avoid pain, which leads to peace of mind.
It's to pay for that hospital bill that you didn't see coming; or that air conditioning unit that no longer works. It’s there to repair the car that just broke down so you can get to work; or the home repairs just after a flood.
Money is there so you don't have to think about not having it. Having it turns a crisis into an inconvenience. I don't want to have to think about money when I have to fly across the country for a funeral to support a friend. It’s traumatic enough, why add to it?
In Conclusion.
Having money gives us the peace of mind that we can weather unfortunate and inevitable circumstances. Which is a far more effective use of money than seeking pleasure from a $20,000 indebted bass boat sitting in a rented boatyard that we use twice a year when we don't have enough money to repair the car that we need to get there.
Stay frosty people. Thanks for reading.
Hi @fijimermaid absolutely agree with you. It is so familiar to me to have an eye on our expenses, or actually better to say that my husband does it very well. Nowadays we are doing renovation of our living room, a lot of work to exchange some wood planks of floor so he is in search for some good quality but affordable. We make jokes saying if we would have won a lottery or Steem would shoot up that would be a great help. But otherwise a good planning of expenses is essential :)
"We make jokes saying if we would have won a lottery or Steem would shoot up that would be a great help."
This is funny. My wife and I have the same conversations.
It's actually really cool that you brought that up @stef1. My wife and I thought about going to Lake Tahoe in California, a very beautiful place, after the pandemic of course. Though, we would drop an easy $5,000 doing it. The fact that we have $5,000 to drop on a vacation, is because we spend very little and we save and invest the rest. We find great peace in knowing we can do something fun even if it is expensive, but we rarely do it because we're already at peace.
Good luck on the renovations. I bet its going to look amazing!
Lake Tahoe in California looks amazing, pure nature, good for hiking and looks not really crowded. I understand what you mean saying it is good that you can effort it but you are happy with what you have. That is what we hope to have.
Like you say we can imagine how the room will be looking like, once it is done we definitely post it :)