written in front
The core of this book is: life must be enjoyed to the fullest, not just to survive. This book does not teach you how to increase your wealth, but how to enrich your life.
1 Extreme life
While it is at least possible for each of us to make more money in the future, there is absolutely no way for us to go back in time and recapture lost time. Therefore, don’t miss the opportunity because you are afraid of wasting money, wasting your life should be more worrying.
When you’re in your 90s, how much fun do you think you’ll have climbing the Spanish Steps in Rome?
To get the most out of your time and money, timing matters.
In order to increase your overall sense of fulfillment in life, it is important to have a variety of experiences at the right age.
The book Money or Life proposes that your money represents life energy. Vitality is all the time you are alive, as long as you are working you are expending a finite amount of prana. Every penny earned through work represents the corresponding consumption of life energy. This is true regardless of salary.
Numerous psychological studies have shown that spending money on experiences makes us happier than spending money on things.
Your life is the sum of your experiences.
Since the rewards of processing energy are experiences you choose, the way to live your best life is to maximize the number of these experiences, especially positive ones.
You only live once, so start thinking about how to have the most exciting, happiest and most satisfying life now!
Suggestion ◎Start actively thinking about the life experience you want to get and the number of times you want to experience it now. There are big and small experiences, some are free, some cost money, some are charitable, and some are enjoyable, but I suggest you think about which meaningful and memorable experiences you really want to get from your life.
2 Investment experience
Everything you do in life—everything you experience every day, every week, every month, every year, and once in a lifetime—defines who you are.
The butler Carson in “Downton Abbey” said a wise word: “Life is a process of constantly collecting memories, and in the end only memories can accompany us.”
Our culture tends to overemphasize the ant virtues while neglecting other virtues, namely hard work and delayed gratification.
Experience is like this: when you invest time or money to obtain experience, you will not only gain immediate pleasure, but also continuous dividends, which is the memory dividend I mentioned in the first chapter
The same goes for investing experience. When you experience something, you get the present, immediate pleasure, while also leaving memories that you can relive later. It’s an important part of being human: whether it’s good or bad, you relive the experience later, often more than once. It might be hearing a song you love, it might be smelling a familiar scent, or seeing an old photo, and suddenly your memory is activated and you will relive an experience. For example, you might think about your first kiss, and if it was a pleasant experience, you might feel dizzy and hot, or you might chuckle to yourself because you were wearing braces, and that kiss was awkward but sweet nonetheless. So every time you recall the original experience, you mentally and emotionally revisit it, gaining an additional experience.
The memories may not be as pleasant as the initial experience, but those memories made you who you are today.
Poly, like many people who invest in real estate, only considers monetary return, not experience return. This is another version of the mistake I talk about over and over again: making money and making money, completely forgetting that making money is for the experiences that define your life.
When you think about it, whether the experience you want is studying, skiing, growing up with your kids, traveling, dining with friends, advancing a cause, going to a concert, or a combination of experiences, we make money to get experience.
As you get older, you will actually have less experience. It’s true that you’ll need money for your retirement; however, you’ll be relying primarily on your memories for retirement in the future, so be sure to spend enough money to invest in your memories.
To sum up my investment advice in one sentence, it is: invest in life experience, and start early! Start early! Start early!
Making thoughtful choices about how you spend your money and spend your time is essential to getting the most out of your life energies.
Suggestion ◎Remember, what I said “as soon as possible” is “start now”. Think back to the experiences you have longed for, and see which of them are suitable for realization today, this month or this year, and what risks you will run if you don’t realize it now.
◎Think about who you would like to get the experience with; then imagine, what kind of memory bonus you will reap if you get the experience with these people early.
◎Think about how you can actively increase your memory bonus. Would it be useful to take more photos of the experience? Is it a reunion with those who have had a good time together? Or make a video or photo book?
3 Why do you want to return to zero before death?
If you spend too much time in your life earning money, but fail to spend it before you die, then you have wasted too much precious life, and it is impossible to get back these lost time. If you still have 1 million to spend before you die, it means you haven’t enjoyed the experience worth 1 million; if you haven’t spent 50,000, it means you haven’t enjoyed the experience worth 50,000. No matter how much is left, it is not the best solution for your life.
It doesn’t matter whether your own income is higher or lower than the example above, because the conclusion still holds: if you don’t want to waste your life energy, your goal should be to spend all your money before you die.
Life-Cycle Hypothesis” (Life-Cycle Hypothesis, LCH). This hypothesis focuses on how people manage their spending and savings throughout their lives in order to achieve “the best use of money”. He proposed that in your life course If you make the best use of your money, you will have “the day you die, your wealth will be exhausted”
For the sake of insurance, but also to avoid leaving money unnecessarily, it is calculated according to the maximum age that a person can survive. Therefore, according to Modigliani’s point of view, a rational person will distribute his life’s wealth according to this “maximum age”.
Of course you can leave your money to someone or something you care about, but the truth is, it would be better for someone or something to get your fortune earlier, why wait until after you die?
Why do I say that people save too much and think too far? I’ve looked at the statistics. If you look at the net worth data by age, you will find that most people accumulate wealth for decades, and most people don’t start to consume wealth until very late.
Some people say they save money for retirement before retirement, but they don’t use the savings at all after retirement
Some people do intend to spend money, but once they reach a certain age, they find that their needs change, or diminish. Retirement planning experts even have terms to describe this spending pattern: “go-go years,” “slow go years” and “no-go years.” . [Illustration] Specifically, the Vitality Year is when you’re just retiring and you’re eager to realize all those experiences that were put off until retirement, and your body and energy (usually) allow you to chase them. Then, usually in your 70s, your bucket list is fulfilled and your body falters, so you start to slow down. After that, in your 80s or later, no matter how much money you have left, your “vitality” is running out. In the words of one retirement planning consultant, “My father is 86 years old and he doesn’t want to go anywhere but stay at home.”
There is a more “active” reason behind why people often save too much, spend too little, and still have money left when they die. Some people never actually think about spending all their money on life experiences, but instead save for old age and unexpected expenses, especially medical expenses.
There is a world of miles between truly “living” and merely “being alive”. I would rather spend money to live than waste the money I have saved from working for several months on a ventilator. This kind of life has no quality at all. If it is too painful, the quality of life may even be negative. So, rather than “precautionary saving” (that’s what economists call it), I’d rather let nature take its course. We all die sooner or later, and I’d rather die “in time” than sacrifice my good years just to live a few days at the end of my life. In my words, “See you in the grave!”
It is wiser to spend your healthcare spending on the “front end” (keeping you healthy and preventing disease) than on the “back end”.
Everything you worry about, there is a corresponding insurance product to provide protection. Of course, I am not suggesting that you buy all kinds of insurance. As we all know, buying insurance costs money, but since insurance companies have designed insurance products for various risks, it shows that these risks can be quantified and eliminated.
Suggestion ◎ If you are still worried and reject the idea of zeroing before death, try to figure out where this psychological resistance comes from.
◎If you love your job and want to go to work every day, then see how to spend money without conflicting with your work schedule.
4 How to spend money? (Won’t really die with nothing left)
You leave too much money on your deathbed – which also means you waste too much life energy earning money, and the money you earn is not spent.
Just knowing an approximate lifespan can allow you to make better decisions about earning, saving and spending money. So, I highly recommend you try out the life expectancy calculator.
Life insurance is to prevent one’s premature death and spend money to protect the survivors, while annuity is to prevent one’s life from being too long and lacking protection (the deposit is spent, and the person is still alive).
A popular rule of thumb when it comes to retirement spending is the “4% rule,” which is to withdraw 4% of your savings each year after retirement. If you have an annuity, you will likely receive more than 4% of your annuity contribution each year. And unlike the 4% withdrawal, the money will definitely be received as long as you are alive.
Simply because I am too afraid that people are still alive and the money is gone, or that I am afraid as long as I think of death, I dare not look at those numbers. If your life is full of fear and avoidance, I dare say you will either waste money needlessly, or leave your hard-earned money on your deathbed because of prudence, that is, you spend years and years. Years of work, in the end, just doing white labor for my own fear.
The premise of this book is that you should focus on maximizing your pleasure in life, not on maximizing your wealth, two very different goals. Money is just a means to an end. Making money can help you achieve the more important goal of being happy in life, but trying to maximize your wealth can actually get in the way of that more important goal.
“The human brain is inherently irrational in the face of death.” People always avoid talking about death, as if death will never come, and too many people have no plan for death. For them, death is just some mysterious date in the future.
I’m not saying you should live each day as if it’s your last. We always need to strike a balance between living in the present and planning for the future. As death approaches, this balance will gradually tilt: the closer we are to death, the more we need a sense of urgency; It is possible to plan for the future. However, if we do not study the timing of our own death at all, and act as if we will live forever, then we will definitely not be able to strike the right balance.
Recommendation ◎ If you are worried that one day you will not die and your money will be spent, you can take a moment to look at annuities as a possible solution.
5 What about the children?
Whatever money you have to give to your children, give it to them before you die, why wait until after?
If you truly put your children first, as you say, then don’t wait until you’re dead to show your generosity.
Since you don’t know when you’re going to die, and you care so much about your children, why would you wait until that “random” time for your grandchildren to get their inheritance? In fact, how can you be sure that your children are alive when you die?
If you wait until after you die to let your children inherit, you are “resigning yourself to fate”. I call it “three randoms”: at random times, random amounts of property are given to random people (because who can Know which of your heirs were alive when you died?). Random, how could it be for the sake of others?
Why don’t so many behave more prudently when it comes to children and gifting? One reason for this is going with the flow, which is the opposite of prudence. Going with the flow is easy, and most of the people around you do, so when you follow their example, you go with the flow like everyone else. In fact, you may not even realize that you are following the herd.
Virginia both learned a lesson from her parents’ experiences: Don’t wait until after death to give money. For her five children and stepchildren, aged 29 to 43, she and her husband are determined to give them money as early as they need. “If you get money at 30,” she rightly points out, “you can buy a nice house and raise your kids in the circumstances you want without having to go through as much as I did.”
If money’s best utility (the time when money brings you the most usefulness or happiness) occurs at age 30, then by the time you’re 30, you’ll be buying an equivalent amount of happiness with every penny. By the time you’re 50, the utility of money is greatly reduced, and you’ll get much less happiness with the same amount of money. The happiness that you can get for $1 at the age of 30, when you are healthy and vibrant, will cost you more money (say, $1.50) to get now.
Suppose you disregard my advice to give money to your children early and instead follow the more traditional path of leaving some money to them when you die. Assuming your life expectancy is 86 years and your eldest son is 28 years younger than you, then when you die, your eldest son will inherit the estate at the age of 58. By this time, he was well past the “peak” age at which he could derive the greatest pleasure from that inheritance. Although I don’t know exactly how old the peak age is, but based on my understanding of human physical and psychological growth, it should be between 26 and 35 years old, and 58 years old is obviously past this optimal point.
I do firmly believe that with your children, your real legacy is the experiences you have with them, especially those you create as they grow up—the teachings and other memories you give them.
Let me start by clarifying my main point: one of the many experiences you leave your children with should be “companionship.”
The reason why I emphasize the quantification of the value of parent-child experience is that it can force you to stop and think about what is really in the best interests of your children: it may be to make more money, or it may be to spend more time with them. Too many people feel that they are working for their children, and they just assume that making more money is good for their children. But unless you stop and think about the quantifiable numbers, it’s impossible to know whether sacrificing time to make more money is going to have a net benefit for your kids.
Is every extra hour you work really worth it to you and your kids? Does working increase your inheritance, or does it deplete your inheritance?
I’ll say it again: the purpose of money is to gain experiences, and for your child, one of those experiences is companionship. Therefore, if you patronize making money instead of creating a common experience with your children, then it is a kind of “deprivation” for both you and your children.
If you really understand the idea that “your legacy to your children is experience”, then you may come to a slightly radical conclusion: once your property is enough to meet the basic needs of the family, then, you continue to work By making more money, you may actually be draining your inheritance to your children because you spend less time with them! The richer you are, the more likely this conclusion is to be true.
Whether the money or time is for your children, a charity, or yourself, the key point is the same: There is a perfect time, but never after you die.
body, spend it on your loved ones, or donate to charitable organisations.
Suggestions ◎Think about how old you want to give your children money and how much you want to give, and think about donations to charity from the same perspective. Discuss these issues with your spouse or partner. Do it now!
6 Balance your life
My conclusion is that the utility of money decreases with age.
In a sense, money works in much the same way for babies as it does for old people: at the beginning and end of life, money is almost worthless.
Most of our spending should be focused on true golden years, not delayed gratification.
Nothing affects your ability to enjoy experiences more than your health, and that’s true at any age. Health is actually much more valuable than money, because if you are in poor health, no amount of money can make up for it, and people who are in good health but have no money can still have many wonderful experiences.
suggestion
◎Think about your current physical condition: what kind of life experience is possible for you now, but may not be possible in the future?
◎ Think of a way to invest time or money to improve your physical condition, and then enhance all future life experiences. ◎Learn how to maintain health by improving eating habits. There are many such books, one I know very well and always recommend is Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman, MD.
◎Do more physical activities that you like (such as dancing or hiking), which can also make you enjoy future experiences more.
◎If your ability to enjoy experiences is more limited by time than by money or health, think of a way or two that you can free up more time by spending money.
7 life in stages
If someone had told me earlier that by the time my daughter would no longer enjoy watching “The Proboscis,” I’d probably hurry up and watch it a few more times with her. Unfortunately, in real life, it is difficult for you to know the specific day when you will not be able to continue to do a certain thing-some things seem to gradually leave us without knowing it. Until they are completely gone, you may not pay much attention to them, or even pay attention to them at all. You just subconsciously assume that some things will last forever, but obviously, they won’t. It’s inevitable, and it’s sad, but there’s a bright side to it: Realizing that nothing lasts forever, that everything passes and dies, can make you feel more grateful for everything and everything in the here and now.
This is the mystery of “each of us will ‘die’ countless times in our lives”: you “died” as a teenager, you “died” as a college student, you “died” as a single and unmarried You “died” as a parent, a child, and so on. This kind of “mini-death” cannot be reversed. Maybe the word “death” is a bit serious, but you should understand the meaning: we are always “moving forward”, passing from one stage of life to the next. I know, I’ve said too much dead and dead, but the positive side is that we have so many “lives” that allow us to live, enjoy, and live to the fullest!
In a person’s life, excessive delayed gratification and the resulting regret will not happen only once; on the contrary, it may happen at every stage of your life: from high school to an illusory bright future, you only know how to study hard I sacrificed too much and missed the joy of countless adolescence. In the middle age, in order to get promoted again and again, I only knew to work non-stop, and repeatedly missed the growth of my adolescent children that could not be repeated.
There is a palliative nurse named Bronnie Ware in Australia. Her job is to take care of patients who have only a few weeks to live. She talks to patients about “if you could do it all over again” and discovers the top five most common regrets.
Her patients’ greatest regret was not being brave enough to live a life true to themselves, but to live within the expectations of others. This is a regret of not chasing your dreams and not being able to realize your dreams.
The second regret is somewhat similar, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
Just being aware that your time is limited can motivate you to use it well.
You don’t have that much time for each stage of your life, and it’s definitely not infinite.
Suggestion ◎ If you feel that it is too much to divide the time for the whole life, you can only do three periods, covering the next 30 years. You can keep adding items to your list, just before age and health aren’t a problem.
◎If you have children, think about your own version of the “Proboscis” story: In the next year or two, before a certain stage of life of your children and yours is over, what experiences do you want to share with them?
8 Know Your Peaks
In fact, delaying gratification is only helpful up to a certain point, and if you’re just “hard work” every day, you run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing you may have delayed it too long. In extreme cases, an indefinite delay in gratification equals no gratification.
suggestion
◎Calculate your annual living cost based on your planned retirement location.
◎Consult your doctor to determine your biological age and risk of death; take all the tests you can afford to understand your current condition and estimate the eventual decline.
◎ Based on your health status and medical history, the ability to think about which activities you enjoy may have declined significantly from the previous year, and how this decline will affect the activities you enjoy.
9 Be bold, not stupid
The first is that no matter how much risk you can tolerate, no matter how bold a move you intend to make with your life, it is generally better for you to act sooner than later.
Second, don’t underestimate the risks of doing nothing. It feels safe to keep the status quo and not take big risks, but think about what you might lose: Would you live a different life if you were a little more daring? You gain a certain sense of security, but you also lose experience points.
The third thing I would remind you of is low risk tolerance and mere habitual fear.
suggestion
◎Find out those opportunities that are almost risk-free to you but you are not taking advantage of. Always remember that it is better for you to take advantage of opportunities while you are young.
◎ Examine the fears that hold you back, whether they are reasonable or irrational. Don’t let irrational fears get in the way of your dreams. ◎Remember that you have to choose at all times. The choices you make reflect what you value and what you don’t value, so choose carefully.
This article is transferred from: https://ljf.com/2023/05/12/1251/
Only for personal collection, the copyright belongs to the original author
This article is reproduced from: https://shoucang.zyzhang.com/%E3%80%8A%E6%9C%80%E4%BC%98%E8%A7%A3%E4%BA%BA%E7%94%9F% E3%80%8B-%E8%A6%81%E6%83%B3%E5%B0%86%E6%97%B6%E9%97%B4%E5%92%8C%E9%87%91%E9 %92%B1%E7%94%A8%E5%88%B0%E6%9E%81%E8%87%B4%EF%BC%8C%E6%97%B6/
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.