Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

What are YOU Working For?

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What are you really working for?

We all work, in some way, shape, or form.  Many of you, when asked the question, “what are you working for”, will likely give the easiest answer.  Money.  That’s what we all work for, right?  We need it to pay our bills, buy our food, and do many of the things that we choose to do.  But, one of the things that I’ve contemplated for some time, and that helped me make the decision to quit my job last year, was the furtherance of that question.  Sure, we all work for money.  But, is that all we work for?  And, if so, should it be?

The conclusion that I came too, as you can probably guess, is that money isn’t everything.  We do need some, but if that’s all we’re working for, it quickly becomes less of the tool that it should be, and, instead, becomes something that makes us feel trapped where we are.

Not All Work

Primal Money

One of the popular diets, recently, is the Primal Diet.  It’s a diet of foods that our primal ancestors (the hunter-gatherers) would have eaten.  Mostly meat, and readily available nuts and fruits.  The idea is that the human race has been around for thousands of years, but only been farming, and eating what we farm, for a fraction of that time.  Proponents think that we haven’t evolved sufficiently enough to properly handle the abundance of grains and other “farmed” foods in our diets.  (sidenote: the increase in Celiac disease over the last few decades might point to them being correct)  Because of that perceived evolutionary gap, they’ve taken up eating what our kind would have eaten before the rise of farming.  The movement made me think, though.  What of money?

For centuries, we’ve used money as a means of trade.  I give you a coin, you give me goods and services.  If I run out of coins, I have to find a way to make more.  I trade my surplus goods and services to someone, and they give me coins.  We repeat that cycle, and we have an economy.  Slowly, coins become the only way to attain goods and services, and we all depend on them.  And the more we depend on them, the more of them we need.  And the more we need, the more we have to sell our goods or services to get more.  Eventually, we end up where we are now.  We all work in order to gain more coins.  Our economies have evolved.  But, if that’s the case, what were they like in the Primal era?

Before we all became obsessed with coins, and money, our ancestors hunted for their food.  They didn’t need to buy it, they just went out and trapped or shot it.  Or they scavenged it off of the tree it grew on.  Or dug it out of the ground where it grew wild.  The work they did wasn’t for a new tv, or a new car, it was for survival.  If they didn’t do the work, they would starve.

If you don’t do the work, you get fired (if you work for someone), or you just don’t make any money.  And, yes, you still might starve.  Eventually.  But, food wasn’t the only thing that many of them worked for.  They worked to help their family survive.  They worked so that their children would grow up healthy and strong.  Their children were their legacy; what they would leave the world when they passed on.

Legacy.

Now, we’ve found the real purpose of work, I think.  That’s why I work, now.  It isn’t about the money, although money can have a place in legacy, but about what I leave the world when I leave the world.  The example that I set for my children, the good works I do, the changes I make in my world that make it better, and the life I lead, are my legacy.  Money is merely a tool, like the bow and arrow for our primal ancestors, to help me do those things.  And, here’s the funny part.  Looking at that list of things, it’s a tool that I don’t need that much of.  I set a better example for my children by being conscious of the things that I do, and by what I teach them.  Donating money to charity is a good work, but there are just as many good works to be done through volunteering your time and skills.  And, I can certainly make changes for the better in this world without money.  My legacy doesn’t need money.  I’ll use what money I have to give it a boost now and again, but it doesn’t need it.

I’m working for my legacy, not for a new tv or a new car, or even a new house.  The realization of that is what helped me make the decision to leave my job.  There will always be other jobs that I can get that will help me pay the bills and put food on the table, but I don’t need one to help me do my work.

What are YOU working for?

photo credit: The Marmot

Is Personal Finance Really Important?

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In case you haven’t noticed, this site is all about personal finance.  Well, mostly.  We certainly talk a lot about personal finance.  But, is personal finance really all that important?

How much time do you devote to your personal finances?  To your budget? To coupon clipping?  In the end, does any of it make a difference?  Or are we merely just going through the motions because of some larger issue?  Ever since my Junior year in high school when my english class went through a whole section on propaganda, I’ve (rightly so) questioned anything and everything.  We don’t deal with propaganda on the level of that they did in war times, but we still deal with it on a regular basis.  And at it’s root is the necessity by those companies who are spreading the propaganda to further the consumerism society that we’ve become.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject of breaking free of what you are, and becoming what you should be.  Books like “No More Mondays” and especially “Early Retirement Extreme” have brought me to take an even closer look at the consumerist lives that we live.  Jacob (the author of Early Retirement Extreme) lives on somewhere around $10,000 a year.  A Year!  Could you even make it 3 months on that?  I know that I would have an incredibly tough time even trying to come close to living on 10k a year.  It would take some very radical changes for me, but I might try working towards that by reducing my consumerist habits.

And, when you reduce your consumerist habits, a funny thing will likely happen.  Your expenses will go down.  And you’ll be able to “live” on less and less.  And another thing that will happen, is that personal finance will become less important.  We worry about the most frugal way to do this or that, or the proper way to save for retirement or buy a house or pay off debt, or even the best way to negotiate a better deal on your next car when what we really should be worrying about is why we are living the lives we are.  How many of you are working jobs you don’t want to because you have all this debt from your house and your car or from all the fun “stuff” you bought on credit?  I know my hand is raised.  How LIBERATING would it be to walk out of your office today and not look back.  And not have to worry that someone was going to come and take your house away.

Do me a favor.  Take 15 minutes and watch this movie that Adam included in his post on focusing on what truly matters.

*direct link to youtube video if my embed doesn’t work for some reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cakm2nIQWo

Now, tell me.  Could you stop and not keep going if you had to?  Or are you so tied to your “career” and “job” that you have to “keep going”? Take the steps today to free yourself of the consumerist lifestyles that we live.  Free yourself from the eternal “going” that we experience every day.  You likely won’t accomplish it in a day, or even a month or year, but if you take a little step every day, you can get there.  I’m taking that journey, step by step, and it’s difficult.  It’s difficult to give up some things that we don’t really think about.  But, if we want to be able to stop whenever we want to, we need to be able to do that.

What If Time Wasn’t An Issue?

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You likely remember questions like this one from your high school classes.  Or your college philosophy classes.  Well, here’s another one.

What if time wasn’t an issue.  What if we knew that we would live to be 200 years old?  Would we still act the way that we do?  Would we still work the same way at the same company doing the same job?  Would we run, run, run until we couldn’t anymore?

Or would we, instead, realize that we had that much longer to achieve our goals and slow down a bit.  Would we pursue more of our passions and less of our profits?

I’m not so sure that anything would change.  I think there would still be people who work 80 hour weeks trying to make as much money as they possibly can so they can have that big McMansion and the Lexus.  And there would still be people who embrace their passions and don’t worry about where the next buck is coming from, only that they are doing the things that they love.

What do you think would change?  How would you handle it differently?

I’ll refrain from assigning an 2000 word essay, but I would like to know what you think.  Leave your thoughts in the comments or write an article of your own in response.