Spending Discipline

Spending discipline is not just a personal decision. Choices have consequences. It is much easier to be “harsh” or stoic, if it is just you. The yogic idea of Tapas is the opposite of a holiday. “Tap” means “to be hot”, but the practice is embracing difficulty in order to gain comfort in it. Where the heat births inner strength. Holidays are normally where we release the pressure built up in a 5-day work, 2-day recovery cycle. Something we look forward to, and use as a reward. With Tapas it is in the other direction. You remove the pleasures and complexity, and when you return to real life you suddenly see the flavour and joy. 

Much of what we spend is habitual and deeply intertwined with our community. “Nothing kills an activist like a mortgage and school fees”. The more extreme measures of cutting back expenses (in order to build buffers of emergency funds and capital to support you in difficulty), become challenging when money going out is not a voluntary pleasure. Fixed expenses are things you no longer make decisions about. They just happen. Like living in a particular area because that is where the school or job is. Moving would have real consequences. Real trade-offs. So even when there are cheaper options, they are not your options. 

When you start the journey of financial planning by writing a list of how you spend, there will be steady outflows that are fixed and regular, and bursts that variable and voluntary. There will be items that feel like your choice and others that feel chosen for you. Every journey towards more autonomy and consent, starts with “where are you”. 

Write that list. See where you are starting from.

Risk and Reward

I am not sure whether I consider myself a “risk taker”. I go through waves, phases, and situations where I am very risk averse and others where I am comfortable with discomfort. When I think of when I was a little guy, there are definitely stories where I was absolutely fearless, and others in the opposite direction. There was a big chap that I had an intense rivalry with at school. I was... not big. I was tiny. Smaller than most of the girls. Still, I played Hooker in Rugby until I was 12 years old. My fearlessness (at that stage) meant I didn’t seem to realise I was so small. My nemesis was in the first team, and I was in the second (of two), and we used to do drills against each other for tap-and-run. Jones would regularly take the taps, and I’d be the guy who would want to tackle him. Maybe it was because of our personal rivalry, but maybe it was because the bigger they are the harder they fall. If you get the tackle right, it doesn’t matter how big they are. It didn’t seem to matter to me that I normally didn’t get the tackle right, and got munched. The (few) times I did were worth it. Risk and reward.