Hello my name is Anthony Ongaro
from Break the Twitch
Today I’m on the Mint blog
talking about how to make financial decisions
like a minimalist
At this point it is entirely plausible
that you’ve heard about this whole minimalism
movement
It’s a movement to own less stuff,
it’s typically focused on things in your
home
and the things that you work to acquire
and instead of acquiring more and more and
more of things we don’t need
focusing on keeping only what we need and
having
more time space and energy for the things
we really care about
In the traditional sense that’s sort of
what minimalism has come to embody
Personally, my favorite definition of minimalism
comes from my friend Joshua Becker of Becoming
Minimalist.
The process of creating this framework
for yourself is really straight-forward
but it does take some time to really dig in
and figure out
what it is that you actually want to prioritize
in your own life
Fortunately the exercise is really just as
simple as Heavy and Light
There’s a lot of technical kind of budgeting
stuff out there
so I want to talk about more what we’re
feeling and the feelings
we want more of and the feelings we want less of
so here’s what you’re going to do grab
a piece of paper
and something to write with - yes an actual
piece of paper
it just feels better to actually write this
and visualize it
as opposed to just thinking about it
it will really help you embrace the things
you’re going to be writing down
On the left side put Light on the right side
put Heavy
and what you’re going to do is just list
as many things
as you can think of that make you feel light
and not just while you’re doing the activity
if it’s playing guitar maybe you feel great
for hours after you finish playing
those are the things you want to focus on
listing in the Light column
on the Heavy column, maybe it feels good in
the moment
or just anything that is kind of driving dopamine
in the moment
but afterwards you feel heavy and it doesn’t
feel good to you
put that in the Heavy column.
After you have the two lists and you have
a chance
to look it over for a minute all it comes
down to is
choosing a few of the top priorities of from
each one
things you want to do more of and things you
want to do less of
and creating some financial rules around it
implement it in a lifestyle experiment for
a certain amount of time
so if you have two things that make you feel
light
that you want to do more of
spend your money on those things for 30 days
and
don’t spend any money on two of the things
that make you feel heavy
for 30 days and implement that lifestyle change
and see how it makes you feel.
Dig in and figure out the things you really
want more of
in your life and the things you want less
of
There are always ways we can reprioritize.
Whether that’s saving more money or paying
off debt
or creating an emergency fund or whether it’s
simply
bringing lunches to work instead of eating
at a fast food place
and instead going out to more coffees with
friends in the morning
it’s creating those shifts in our financial
decisions on a regular basis
to reflect our values and the life we actually
want to be living.
