What have you got to show for it?

I was reading about a member of a very successful boy band from the 1990s who recently got a speeding fine of £1000 and he was saying he can’t afford to pay it, he has no money left. 

And I was thinking about people who tell me they want to have coaching to change their career and become a trainer but despite the fact they have jobs paying £50,000 or £70,000 they have absolutely no money saved up, so they can’t afford to do it. 

And I read somewhere that a third of people in the UK have less than 2k saved over their life so far, which is not much of a buffer if things go wrong – e.g. work or health.   And the average life savings to date is 11k.   Of course it’s age dependent, but still, that’s a low number compared to our total earnings:  25k for 40 years is a million pounds you’ve earned!   So on average we end up saving maybe 1% of what we earn….

It makes me think that many of us are not making any progress at all in our lives; we are working hard to earn money which then all gets soaked up in costs, and at the end of each month we are back to where we were, only a little bit older.

Saving up money is not what progress is, - accumulating happiness throughout one's life is almost certainly more important than accumulating money - but I think we'd all agree that to save up a decent buffer would give us a feeling of security, enable us to cope with problems that might crop up, speeding fines at the very least, and also enable us to invest in opportunities if they came up.

The problem is that we tend to spend up to our income, so when we get paid a little bit more we immediately expand our lifestyle, instead of saving the difference, or at least some of the difference. 

And the ridiculous thing is that expanding our lifestyle doesn’t make us happier, even though we think it will. If you buy more expensive wine or a more expensive car it will make you happy in the short term but you very soon get used to it and then it doesn’t increase your happiness. This is known as the hedonic treadmill. 

And of course it’s addictive, so once you have scaled up it’s very difficult to scale down again, although - a bit like giving up sugar in your tea - if you do scale down again you do get used to it after the initial shock. 

Where are you on the hedonic treadmill? Could you scale down a bit, or not scale up your lifestyle when you next get an increase in your income, so you could get better at putting away some savings?

The same goes for TIME. When you next get some spare time, what would happen if you didn’t immediately use it up on yet another new project? What if you didn’t allow yourself to get a bit worse at saying no, so that you could keep that time for something really good?

Onwards and upwards!

CC

PS - Learn more about Happiness here: LinkedIn Learning, and Udemy

PPS - and Life Skills Collection here: www.lifeskillscollection.com