A Life Well Lived

“Some people are so poor, all they have is money” – Bob Marley

Hi all,

I read a short piece from Morgan Housel earlier this month and wanted to pass along a few points from his latest post, A Few Thoughts on Spending Money.

• There are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life.  The other is as yardstick of status to measure yourself against others.  Many aspire for the the former but get caught up chasing the latter.
• Everyone can spend money in a way that will make them happier, but there is no universal formula on how to do it.  The nice stuff that makes me happy might seem crazy to you, and vice versa.  Like many things in finance, debates over what kind of lifestyle you should live are often just people with different personalities talking over each other.
• Unspent money buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over your time.  Every dollar of savings buys a claim check on the future.
• Some wealthy people struggle to spend money on things that would make them happy because “I’m a saver” becomes such an ingrained part of their identity. What you intended to be a strategy to achieve a better life turns into an ideology you are beholden to.
• The more money you have, the harder it becomes to know how to spend it in a way that will make you happy.  And that confusion sets in at fairly low levels of income. Luke Burgis writes: “After meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire.  And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.”

Like everyone else, there’s always a push and pull from life’s expenses on what we want vs. what we need.  This was most apparent on my most recent hockey-related adventure to Madison, WI.  Buying souvenirs and eating out more often than you normally would is part of the fun on these “mini-vacations”.  I’m usually the one who is more conscious of the spending (curse of the job), but in more recent years I’ve softened my stance a bit.  Maybe it’s seeing the kids getting a little older and realizing it’s all moving too fast.  Maybe it’s becoming more financially comfortable as we start to earn more later in life.  But to be honest, the real catalyst for this post was the recent passing of a neighbor and parent at my son’s school.  46 years old and leaves behind a wife and two young boys.  He’d known about the terminal nature of his diagnosis for sometime and was lucky enough to be able to quit work and focus on his bucket list, which was not filled with regret about his mortgage rate being .5% too high, or his 401k’s relative performance with the S&P 500.

Just a reminder to hug everyone a little tighter this month and remember to try and create future nostalgia when we all hopefully look back at a life well lived.

– Adam