|
 |
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
|
|
TOC Chapter
1 Chapter 2 Chapter
3 Chapter 4 Chapter
5 Chapter 7 Chapter
8
Posted May 13, 2008.
Home
| Making Money
| Portfolios
| Dividends
| Retirement
| Articles
| Charts
| Stocks
| Tables
| |
