Pick a number: $1 million, $10 million, $50 million.
It’s NEVER going to be enough …
You see, when you get to whatever number you pick in advance as being THE NUMBER you will find that your expenses magically jump up to meet it … or worse, beat it …
Why?
Before you make the number, you are thinking like a [plug in your favorite means to scrape enough money to subsist on: employee, small business owner, plumber/electrician/doctor/lawyer/accountant].
This means that you are dragging in your [plug in your subsistence salary here: $30,000, $50,000, $100,000, $200,000] …
… which just happens to be barely enough to pay your current [plug in your vices here: food, mortgage, car payments, plasma TV payments].
So, getting to [plug in your “I’m really rich’ number in here: $1 million, $10 million, $50 million] really would make a difference … in your mind!
You see, your current lifestyle isn’t your ‘dream lifestyle’, as soon as you improve your Net Worth your dreams also go up!
That means that your $120,000 apartment suddenly becomes $350,000 when you have $1,000,000, then it becomes $1,500,000 when you have $5,000,000 and so on …
Your $5,000 chevy at Just Over Broke becomes a $35,000 Cadillac CTS at $1,000,000, and a $120,000 Maserati Gransport Spyder (oh, yeah!) at $5,000,000.
A better way is to work backwards: decide how much you need to earn each year to finance the life of your dreams (more on this in a later post) and multiply by 20 and that is The Number for you.
The answer will probably scare you into action (it’s the reaction I’m hoping for!) or to death (bummer), but, always keep that Number in mind when deciding what ‘rich’ means to you …
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What a great post and so true! Prior to setting up a solid budget, every time I earned more money, I spent more money. It took quite a bit of discipline to finally bring my expenses inline with my income.
How true… we adjust our lifestyle so easily to fill or overfill our incomes. Instead if we adjusted our incomes to allow our incomes to achieve our dreams… well that’s another ball game.
Good stuff.
Thanks for all the information, it has giving me a new way of looking at things.
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