Let’s talk Money: To live like no one else…
“If you will live like no one else, later you can live (AND GIVE) like no one else.”
Dave Ramsey, Personal Financial Guru
People around me constantly ask me about my crazy way of savings and that I am not “enjoying” life enough. My thinking is that, if I follow everybody to live, at the end of the day I am going to be broke like a lot of the people in the USA. For your information, our household do not earn crazy amount of money and our household actually live quite below the “middle class standard” within the Bay Area in California, but technically, I am / we are enjoying life doing things we like.
I guess the reason why I am choosing to live the way we are living at this moment is because I don’t want to be in this corporate rat race that much longer anymore. Ever since we have come back from some poorest part of developing countries, I am looking at my time in a different perspectives, I don't want to "sell" my most valuable asset, time, for only money… and I need to make sure I live the lifestyle so that we can achieve that.
Couple lessons that I have learned:
I do not need to chase after the newest technology...
Or simply speaking, I do not need the newest iPhone. Chasing after all these new technologies and gadgets simply is a totally waste of money and time. How often we “trade-in” or even throw away all those totally usable phones or existing gadgets for the sake of wanting or deceiving ourselves that we “need” the absolute newest one? I am still holding onto my iPhone 6, and in fact I just got the battery replaced for only $30 USD. I have also never dropped my phone, I am pretty sure I can wait another say… 2-3 years before I really need an upgrade. Long story short, Delayed gratification.
Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, is the ability to resist the temptation for an immediate reward and wait for a later reward. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. Source
Be Content with what we have:
Paul says is right on 1 Timothy 6:6: “godliness with contentment is great gain.” I started to feel content just couple years ago, I really don’t need that much to be happy and to be honest, back then when I had more stuff, I didn’t feel the joy and happiness in me that I was hoping and longing to get. The problem is that, when I got to the status of “I don’t really need to think about money to enjoy life”, i realized that my void wasn’t being filled. Especially after I got the opportunity to meet with more people from the poorest areas around the globe, they seem to be content with little things, they are happy; and how come we, the people living in the USA(!!), supposedly the richest, or maybe the second richest country in the world, only rank #14 on the 2017 World Happiness Report? There seems to be a diminishing of return there.
Don’t Rely on a 9-5 Job:
For a long time I have been dreaming to climb the corporate ladder, and to be a CFO by mid-30s… later to realized that I would rather want the freedom to do something i really want outside of the corporate world. So with that mindset, I started to look at so many other avenue that can generate me passive income for the mid to long term - I am not there yet, but I am sure we will be there one day. At the end of the day, I just don’t want to rely on somebody else, hoping and praying the company won’t go down, that the company won’t lay me off… blah blah blah… Might as well when I have a chance and the time right now, to turn my W-2 income into passive income.
We are not there yet, but we will...
Question: What are you doing today so that you can save money for the future?
Blessings,
Stephen
(Joshua 24:15)
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