Transcription
I haven't always been good with money. I've had overdraft fees. I've shopped for entertainment. I've always known what I should do. But in the moment, for me, it's always easy to justify spending, especially when it's just this once or it feels like the one last thing.
But when I started minimizing, everything about my shopping habits became clearer. And it might look like we're living very lavishly right now, but behind the scenes, it's very simple. We're not doing tourist attractions. We're not eating out. We're cooking simple food from local markets and living at a slower pace. We're staying in modest homes and not in vacation ones and saving far more than we ever did before.
Travel for us right now is an investment in our work, in our skills, in the education of our children. But it also has given us the opportunity to live well below our means. And for the first time, it feels aligned. We're finally spending intentionally.
I used to spend so much money treating myself. The $7 maja, the eating out when life felt chaotic, hair, nails, skin care, appointments, all in the name of doing something nice for myself. But it became a trap and an expensive one at that. I remember driving home from a massage one day thinking, "I'm not any happier right now. I'm not less stressed than I was a year ago before I started getting massages." It's not that any of these services are bad. But I realized that I wasn't actually solving anything in my life. I was just managing the symptoms of a life that felt too full.
So, I canceled the appointments and instead I created some downtime in my schedule. And here's what I found. Taking walks, sleeping well, slowing down, eating simple food, especially outside. The things that make me feel good are often free. But we've been trained to believe that self-care is something you can buy, something you can outsource, something you have to schedule, when really it's something you just have to tune into for yourself.
Number two is to invest in yourself. This might not sound like a frugal living tip off the bat, but hear me out. I keep a running list of skills that I want to learn because I used to respond to curiosity by buying things. And now I respond by learning things. Instead of collecting stuff, I want to collect skills. And that shift has changed so much in my life. I bake our own sourdough now because of a class I took. I don't buy snacks or crackers. And I think that alone saves our family thousands of dollars. Instead of upgrading my camera, I found a mentor who could teach me how to use it better. I even learned how to cut hair.
And what I've realized in all these examples is this. When you invest in yourself, you create something that compounds. It's like the difference between giving someone fish and teaching them how. Skills save you money. They actually make you money and they shape the way you live. And more than that, they can become something you can pass on. I like to think of learning new things and staying curious, finding new mentors, reading books as something that's not just an investment in me, but is also an investment in my kids.
Number three, don't upgrade. Everywhere you look, there is a better version. I've bought so many things in my life that at one point I just felt like I had to have only to find myself decluttering them later. Because that new feeling doesn't last, it fades. Not always after the first use, but sometimes for me, after the first spill, after the first time you see something slightly better. And then I find myself back in the cycle again, chasing a finish line that doesn't exist. So now I don't upgrade. It's just a rule. If something works, it's good enough because every upgrade you skip creates money. And that money can be used to build something that actually matters to you. Here I just had an outdoor shower. Sorry for the wet hair. It felt so good. Nothing like an outdoor shower, right? So nice.
So the next rule is kind of silly and it's this. If it's just one bad day, save the money. When I started minimizing and then I started getting a little more like non-judgmentally reflective with myself about where I was spending money, why I was spending money, what were the patterns that were coming up as to when I'd be hitting checkout on my cart. And this is what I found. Often, and I mean like 99% of the time, it was in a chaotic moment. I would be trying to throw money at a problem. Like I would try to fix things by spending money. And here's the thing, not everything can be made better with money and especially can't be made better with spending. Not every inconvenience needs an upgrade. And even if you do upgrade, what I've found is that it often doesn't make it any better. The hard things in life, the hard days. And often, you know, you think in your mind when something's like going on and you're having a hard time that it's going to be a full day, but often it's just a moment and the moments pass.
And so when you can start to live by this rule, I find that it not only helps me save money, but it also allows me to just accept things and like be a little more calm in the moments when they are hard. Like for example, with flying, I don't like flying on airplanes, but traveling with our kids right now, it's one hard day that we have to have in order to get to the places we want to go. So the me before, what I would do when we were flying is like buy stuff to have the day be more fun. Whether that was like special coloring books or entertainment for the kids or even upgrades to our seats to like make it just a little bit better. I would also always like impulsively eat on those days like buy food in addition to the food we already brought just to like pass the time, magazines, whatever. Coffees, matchas, like any type of treat yourself stuff would always happen on those hard days. And just contrasting with the way we're traveling now, which is just trying to make the best of the hard days. Meaning like on the plane, I think I'm just more embracing like, "Okay, this isn't my favorite day, but I'm not going to spend money to fix it." It kind of just makes me settle into this almost like silly energy of like, "This is a hard day, but um what we're going to do is just get through it." And I find that I'm not so frantic like fighting it. I'm more just letting it be. And that in of itself is not necessarily fixing it, but it's definitely changing the way the experience unfolds for me.
And I've never really encountered a like a life hack or a rule that maybe this is personal to me again. But like so easily allows me to kind of snap out of it when I get flustered and into my old impulsive habits or even I was thinking about it when I gave birth to my last child. Uh that my the birth that I had with him, it was more painful than I was thinking it would be. I had a home birth and it was my second one. And so I thought I had the whole thing dialed. And I just kept reminding myself like even as the contractions were harder than I thought they were going to be, I was like, "It's one bad day, you know, it's going to be fine." And it was. I thoroughly enjoyed my birth. Gave birth to a beautiful baby. And I don't think one hard day should keep you from doing the things you really want to do, living the way you really want to live, going the places you really want to go. And it certainly shouldn't make you impulsively spend money in a way that you regret either.
The next rule is to become a creator, not just a consumer. I think this is the natural progression from investing in yourself. When you start to invest in yourself, grow your skills. I think the next the natural next step is to create things with those skills. You don't just learn take a pottery class and learn to make pottery without getting your hands into clay. It's the natural next step. In this whole wellness world, we've been sold this idea that we need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to go to an exotic wellness retreat for like a weekend once a year to take care of ourselves when you could learn the skills to make your home a retreat you could come home to every day.
What I so hope is that everyone that encounters this channel will be inspired to not feel the need to like escape your life on your phone, escape your life to a retreat, escape your life by shopping, and that instead you'll learn how simple it is to actually start little by little creating a life that you can enjoy. It's very simple and it's very attainable. I think about this too with free content that's out there. I'm so much more drawn now towards content that equips me with skills that then inspires me to create. So whether it's like parenting and there is so much free content out there now that can teach me how to be a better parent and that I can put into practice right now like right after I stop watching the video or that teach me skills about how to live a simpler life or to grow food or to make better YouTube videos. And the important distinguisher here with this creator versus consumer, it's not that you stop learning. It's that you take the things you're learning and you put your hands to them. You do something with them. You take a risk and you try it.
The sixth rule is that work is a gift. I used to be someone that, you know, I as I thought about growing up, like in high school, people would ask me what I want to do for work. And the only thing I could think is like trying to hack a way where I could work as little as possible and do the things that I think are fun as much as possible. But now I think about work very differently, especially now that my husband and I quit the 9 to 5 world and we've started this business and we're homeschooling our kids. I think about work as contribution.
We were in town yesterday and I met this guy. We were at the market and he has an organic farm and all his whole mission is just to feed hungry children that live inland from here. Uh unfortunately there's this problem here in Mexico where there's been this generational gap in passing down of knowledge about growing food and cooking food and we're in quite a food desert if you don't know how to grow your own food. So his whole goal is to just teach these people how to feed themselves and to grow food. So it's a nonprofit organization. He just has this market where they sell their food to people in town and then all the money goes towards feeding families inland. It's really beautiful. Anyways, he said this thing to me. He was like, "You know, I might not do real estate forever because that's his real job and I might not surf forever, but I know I'll do this forever." And I think that just sums it up perfectly.
When you stop thinking of work as drudgery, when you exit that fast food culture when it comes to work, where you're just working so that you can have more stuff and more upgrades, when you realize after maybe that like sixth load of stuff in your car, that you had enough the whole time, you had more than enough. So much that you were drowning in too much. When you reach this place of peace of knowing that I can exhale, I have more than enough. Even if I don't hit my goals, even if we make less money than I made last year, it doesn't take much to live a good life, to meet my needs. That is a moment that changes everything. That's when maybe you can stop and realize that the chains that you feel bound to, maybe this job, are just put on by you and your lifestyle choices. Starting to see work as a gift. Knowing that I will never quit, seeing that beautiful relationship it has with growing my own wealth, this goal I have to leave money to my children's children, but also growing in wisdom. Teaching you requires me to keep learning, to keep growing outside my comfort zone. And I think we're all made for that.
Rule number seven might just be the most important rule of all. And that is don't let frugality become an identity. And that's because frugality can very quietly turn into scarcity. It's very similar when I think about minimalism with hoarding. It's this clinging, this living tense and tight and the fear that you'll never have enough or that you'll never be able to afford that. So you just stay small and you keep saving and you don't put yourself out there. You don't leave your comfort zone. You just wait on an external force to change your world. But that is not what this is.
My husband is really good at articulating this because he used to be extremely frugal out of fear. And so this morning we're talking about this video and he said to me, "Frugality is not about staying small. It's about living intentionally." And as a family, my husband and I, one of our core values is to leave an inheritance to our children's children, which right off the bat is like, wow, that's a lot of money. But when you start to think about it more, if you're going to leave money to your children's children, then that means you also have to leave an inheritance of wisdom. And not just of wisdom, but of skills. That's a way of living that they would choose long after we're gone. That causes them to continue to grow, to grow the money, and to grow the legacy of wisdom.
So, what does that mean? That means that we have to continue to grow. We have to continue to leave our comfort zones to take risks. We have to learn how to invest not just in one thing like ourselves or a business but also in the stock market, in real estate, to other people that we really believe in. Not just saving, stockpiling and staying comfortable. Things now are so cheap that even if you are living in poverty, you can have way more stuff than you can manage. You can feel like you're drowning in stuff. So, learning how to be wise, learning how to be intentional, living from a place where your nervous system is regulated enough to take risks, to put yourself out there, to have the capacity for that, to have that like childlike wonder and excitement about life and learning. That requires building a life where you have margin and space and time to think, not just running around like a task rabbit all day getting stuff done.
If you enjoyed this video, it might seem small and insignificant, but something you can do that would really help would be just to like this video. It means that at least one other person will hopefully see this video and maybe their life and their finances will be improved by it, too. Thank you for spending this time with me today. All the best to you and your family and we will see you again next week.