Eat Your Spinach

Chapter 6: Celebrate: Enjoy Your Wealth All the Time

Because saving and investing requires a life-long commitment to be most effective, it is important that you take steps to stay motivated to do them
both all your life. This means that you have to know what makes you want to continue saving and investing, and to make sure that you do the things that keep you on the track to wealth. As with any endeavor, self-knowledge is the key to this. For many, some combination of four things will accomplish this when tuned to your own personality and desires. The four are: 1) learn to enjoy the prospect of wealth; 2) pay yourself dividends at important milestones; 3) form a contact group for mutual encouragement and 4) take active steps to become the “leader of your life”.

Learn to enjoy the prospect of wealth

Human happiness seems often to derive from things remembered or things contemplated for the future. You can use this as a motivation to save and invest. Make conservative forecasts about where your investment plan will take you in five, ten, twenty and thirty years. Visualize what you will be able to do as a result and imagine this in as much detail as you find interesting. Will you have enough to travel widely if that is something you value? Then think in detail about where you would go and what you would do. Is a second home a goal for your plan? Think about where it will be and what you will do there. For most of us, it is necessary to have a good reason to defer gratification, and the more concrete and clearly seen the reason is, the easier the deferral will be.

This technique works in the short term as well. If you plan to save fifty dollars this week by taking public transportation and eating at home, calculate how much money that will be in 20 years and think about what you can do with it then. The main thing is to keep yourself and those that influence you in a positive frame of mind about saving and investing. Anything that becomes an apparently pointless chore has little chance of long term survival.

Also, not all motivation has to be the contemplation of positive outcomes. As Samuel Johnson said, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It may be possible to concentrate your mind on saving and investing by envisioning yourself bagging groceries and eating dog food at age 75.

More in this chapter:

Pay yourself dividends at important milestones

Form a contact group for mutual encouragement

Where to Buy

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