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