Many fast talking financial advisors may tell you that you need to invest in gold, the latest tech stocks, or international funds to be rich. What they don’t tell you is that the best financial decision you can make for your life is to invest the money (and time) into your body and health. By continually focusing on maintaining your level of fitness, you can avoid substantial health costs in your future.
Advice for timing the market or short selling stock is given by investment firms that are trying to make a killing by charging a percentage fee on your savings. Your first step towards securing your financial future actually comes from a place you would least expect it to. Let me break down why the best financial investment you can ever make is in your body.
Today is the four month anniversary of Pocket Changed! In honor of the past 120 days, 82 posts, and who knows how many words typed, I thought I’d do a bit of a recap of the some of the best posts and create a starting point if you are newer to Pocket Changed.
If this is your first time here, welcome! Read what Pocket Changed is all about and find out why I write. For a complete listing of all articles, head to the archives.
My Financial Journey
My life has been financial rollercoaster from my childhood to today. Be sure you check out the full story about my financial journey.
First Step
Your first step to improving your financial picture should be to check out my series on the 10 Financial Foundations. Also check out some of the best things that I recommend to start change your life for the better.
We all have dreams for our life that we want to come true. The problem is that these dreams are sometimes nothing more than vague ideas like “traveling the world” or “being debt free”. Just having a dream is not enough to make it come true.
To reach your dreams you really need to analyze exactly what they are, why you want them and lay out a plan to get them. If you want to accomplish anything, you need to determine goals to reach along the way. Without these sub steps you can wander aimlessly in search of the future life you want.
To help with this, my friend David Damron over at Life Excursion is launching Destination X: Your Guide to Accomplishing Anything. This digital experience is an inexpensive guide for taking your dreams or passions in life and turning them into actionable goals.
(If you can’t see the video above, watch the Destination X Review on Vimeo.)
Read the full article →
Throughout my life I have seen many people who are hesitant to change. Some were scared to leave home and go off to college. Others worried about missing their friends and finding a job, so they delayed graduating from college by staying for a fifth year. When they were stuck in a job they didn’t enjoy or weren’t passionate about they didn’t look for alternatives. In all of these situations, the individuals were afraid of change.
The main reason people fear change in their lives is that they don’t want to regret making the wrong decision. Even if they know that they will go on to bigger and better things in their life, they don’t want to leave what they have now because they are used to it. They get comfortable with their surroundings, group of friends and cushy paycheck.
When I was in college I felt like I was always in motion. Whether it was riding my bike to class or playing intramural sports, it always felt good to be taking care of my body’s physical fitness just through regular habits I had created. After I graduated college and started my first desk job I began to sit for the majority of the day and it took a toll on my body. I had begun living a sedentary lifestyle.
There would be the hour long commute, eight plus hours at my desk and sometimes three or four more hours sitting in class at night school for my graduate degree. There were days that I sat for 16 of my 17 waking hours. Within months I started to develop back problems and just felt unhealthy compared to my college self. Below are the tactics I used to help prevent creating a sedentary lifestyle for myself after college.
The young man spent his whole life trying to impress other people. He always got straight A’s in school for his parents, worked hard in college to find a stable job for his future family and put in overtime at the office for his boss. At times he would think to himself how much he didn’t enjoy the path his life was on, but he dismissed the thought quickly because he was “doing well” in the view of society.
He kept his head down for a few years staying on track in his career, completing graduate school and putting his life’s energy into a job that he wasn’t passionate about. Some days he would come home from work and feel the need to escape from the reality of what his life had become. He would waste nights thinking back to how much he missed the free time he had in college, watching countless television shows or playing hours of video games. Thousands of dollars would be spent on electronics, trips to see friends and eating out to try and make him happy enough to forget his grueling, boring day job.
The man would lie down in bed after the long day was over and think, “I feel like I am just treading water in the middle of a giant ocean.” His life was not going in the direction that he ever thought it would and he didn’t see any way out. By living a life based on other people’s expectations he had created a life that felt like a prison cell. He was trapped and needed to escape. Read the full article →
Morbid? Maybe. True? Absolutely.
I’ve come to the realization that the concept of putting in your time and effort just to get a paycheck, save for retirement and put off living your life until your older is a futile attempt at keeping citizens of a capitalist society in check. Since as far back as I can remember I have been living the life that I thought I was supposed to be living.
Do well in school, go to college and get a job. Stay at a job you aren’t passionate about, put up with your commute to work and stick with the status quo. Buy the latest gadgets, watch too much television and collapse in bed each night dreading the next morning to come. I don’t know about how you live your life, but I’m done living like that.
This week I will be writing about all of the people that have changed my life over the last three years. These posts will be long because there have been many people that have made a positive impact on my life. Today’s post describes the non-conformists that have made me look at my life differently and change it for the better.
The life I am striving to have is very different than the one I have now. I want to make my own schedule, have the freedom to live where I want and minimize my physical possessions. To get to this point I get inspiration from many different writers and web personalities. I have compiled a list of all 19 of them and some of my favorite posts, quotes and resources they provide.
We’re right in the middle of every college basketball fan’s favorite time of the year: March Madness. Some people that don’t even follow sports regularly will make an exception to watch it, much like the Super Bowl, just to witness the drama unfold and experience the last second, game winning shots. But filling out a bracket at work isn’t the real reason why people get so caught up in the shear excitement of March Madness.
Every single one of the teams in the tournament could go on to win it all, but most people don’t even give them a chance. Teams that make it into the tournament on automatic bids from lesser-known conferences are written off by sports analysts before the first games even tip-off. The truth is that all of these teams have a chance to win and that is what makes it exciting to watch.
So often in our society we unwillingly accept more responsibility, more possessions and more obligations. At our jobs we continually volunteer for more responsibility in hopes that it will lead to more visibility or a faster promotion. We may feel that the more expensive things we accumulate the better we will look to others. To gain a sense of inclusion and involvement, we participant in more social groups, sports teams and professional training than our calendars can handle. I say enough is enough.
We should start to say no. “No” to having more duties at work when we don’t have additional capacity. “No” to continuing to collect needless possessions when we have more than enough already. “No” to planned events every night of the week just to stay busy. Life can be hectic and stressful enough already with what is currently going on in our lives, there has to be a good reason to add to it.
