In this episode, we discuss the importance of not allowing the stuff you own, own you and prevent you from reaching your goals or moving on with your life.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe where I combine financial planning with self-development coaching for Latino professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about how a luxury once tasted becomes a necessity. Once you start upgrading your life with a new car, new home, new types of food, and other things, it’s hard to start downgrading things because you’re so used to those luxuries. As a financial planner, I see it, people get a raise and they want to start upgrading their life. That’s fine but you have to make sure you don’t become a slave to those things.
If you had to start downgrading your life due to other circumstances, would you be able to do it? For me, I had to downgrade tremendously to start my own financial planning company. I moved in with my parents, I sold a lot of my stuff, and I gave up vacations and buying stuff. I’m okay with this because I know this is what is required to give me the future that I want.
I do not want to be in a job that I hate but I stay at that job because it helps me get the stuff that has been deemed a necessity. That’s when you start to give up on your body and your happiness but you just got enough to help you stay satisfied. I remember one of my old co-workers told me that they were sitting in front a client and they were having cash flow problems and a big reason they had cash flow problems was because they had to have a luxury car and when my old co-worker brought that maybe they should downgrade their car, the client scoffed at that idea and said “You expect me to drive a Camry?”
Whatever you do with your money is your choice, but make sure you know the deal before you accept the deal. By accepting car payments for a luxury car, then you might not put that much in your retirement accounts and you will have to work longer? But what happens if something happens to your health and you can’t go back to work? Are you prepared for that moment?
Some people will be and many won’t. I’m a big believer that if you want more in life you have to be more in life. To be more in life you have to work on yourself with your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual self. The problem is that you want the top one percent of stuff but your skills are not in the top one percent and you borrow against your future to get what you want. If you borrow too much against your future, then you might not be able to make those payments.
This is why you have to understand that a luxury once tasted becomes a necessity and how it negatively affects your future. You might not a pay cut for two years so that you can four x your pay after that time period because you don’t want to live below your means. If you do take a pay cut, that means you’re working on something that will give you a better future in your spare time and not using it for recreational purposes. For me, success is not guaranteed but I’m doing what I need to do to ensure a brighter future.
I know that I could easily be in a job that pays me way more than I’m earning right now as a business owner but I know that if I did that, I wouldn’t have the time I want to work on my dream. I recently just moved in with my parents four months ago and the amount of work I’ve done in that four months would have taken me two years. In that time period, I wrote two books, record over 80 podcasts, took a marketing course, and established my own financial planning firm. I work pretty much every single day and I make sure that I’m doing important stuff to help me with my business in the future. So I’m okay with giving up the luxuries now.
And you should practice giving up luxuries once a month. You should wear your worst clothes and eat beans and rice, and ask yourself, is this thing I fear? Benjamin Franklin did this exercise when he had to make a decision about not taking someone’s money for an ad that he deemed inappropriate. It was a lot of money and so he when to the bakery to buy a penny loaf, he wore his worst clothes, and he slept on the floor, to see if he could live that way and he decided that he could live like that and not give up on his morals. How many people would do that same thing?
I think this is an important exercise to do because it will prepare you for when times get tough and if you practice for this and it affects other people, then while everyone else is scrambling to figure out what is going one, you can take advantage of the situation because you will have a clear mind and will be able to see the signal through all the noise. If you allow luxuries to become a necessity, then that can make you antifragile as a person. You just crumble under the pressure and you may not be able to recover.
I feel like I could lose everything and I would be okay. I would just pick up the pieces and start all over. There is a great story of Thomas Edison where he was in his 60s and his factory with all his equipment and patents were destroyed in a fire. When the fire happened, he didn’t cry and get upset, he woke up his family and told them to look at this fire because they will probably never see something like that again. Then guess what, Thomas Edison and his team were able to rebuild everything and make his company even more profitable. That is the true definition of not allowing luxuries to become necessities and that is the level I want to aspire to. If I get knocked down, I’m able to pick my self up and be even stronger as a person.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, remember that a luxury once tasted becomes a necessity. So make sure that the things you own don’t own you. It’s okay to have nice things but don’t let them be your downfall when times get tough or allow them to take away from your future. When that setback happens you want to be prepared for it and one way to practice for that downfall is to take one day a month and practice the simple life with your worst clothes and beans and rice. This is good training and will just make you a stronger person in the future.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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