Recovering from financial calamity is fraught with con men, pyramid schemes, get-rich-quick guides, and work-from-home advice. Each of these examples provides a “solution” to debt. With their help, they suggest you can recover and live a better future.
When I was in debt, I wanted a quick fix. Unlike consumption, where it was effortless to swipe a credit card, recovering from debt meant putting the breaks on everything. All the momentum – from advertisements to cultural upbringing to environmental expectations to relationships – was moving me in one direction. I needed to stop, and didn’t know how or who to turn to.
Unfortunately, many of these methods fail to help people in need. They miss the mark, take advantage of those with less, and tend to only work for a small portion of the population.
A couple years ago, I remember wading through my Gmail spam folder, wishing that loan payment and relief emails were true. They marketed special exemptions and “secret” deals to wipe the slate. These clear scams seemed like magical oases of monetary support. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could click three times and my debt would wash away?
The reality is we share two equations for our financial lives:
Income – Expenses = Net Income/Loss
Free Time – Work = Net Free Time
We all know it, but how we approach these solutions varies greatly. We can add to our income through wealth, jobs, or advocating for pay raises. Similarly, we can reduce our expenses by cutting cell phone bills, reducing energy expenditures, or selling a car. What remains is our net (total) positive or negative number. If we are all constrained by these equations, creativity must occur on both ends – with income and expenses.
Today, I advocate for people to reduce expenditures before adding on more income opportunities. Frugality helps people minimize spending and prevent spending – thus heightening net income. By removing expenses, we tend to simplify our lives and work less. Hence, those who pursue frugality first are able to free up time.
While I realize the necessity of work, we live in an overworked and underpaid society. If we can manage to spend less, our lives can be fuller – across economic strata. Free time is a dying quotient across age groups. Even children have less time for recess! Fun, free play is at the heart of creative discovery. When we’re overworked, stress levels spike and life becomes a dull day of shower, eat, wash, repeat.
Before pursuing scams and “special offers” that tack on more qualifiers and hoops, consider reducing your workload by removing anything extraneous. Subtraction is easier and safer than working longer hours, picking up a second job, or working on side jobs. Likewise, it helps you stay psychologically and medically well – not overworked and near the brink.
Start with frugality. Remove all the superfluous from your budgets and lifestyle. Likely, there’s room for less.
If that’s not enough, then start hustling.
Great challenge! And don’t even get me started on recess. All day kindergarten with ONE 20 minute recess? They need to get into good colleges! No time for recess! Let’s bring back free time for everyone!
A great post, and I agree that subtraction is the easiest (and in my case most satisfying) way of fixing things. In our busy society people often seem to confuse activity with progress, even though there isn’t necessarily any connection between the two. And if you sit back and take stock of your situation, you often find that a lot of the things we do don’t bring any more happiness, make us feel more stressed, and actually cost us more money.
So why do people keep doing all of these things? Maybe because they think that activity = progress!
Yes! It’s so much easier to downsize/simplify your life than to increase your income.
This doesn’t have a lot to do with frugality, but I think it speaks a bit to the overworked nature of society and of our children in particular. I stumbled across a list of 1st grade readiness standards from 1979. They’re very different from today’s content-driven standards. I wrote about it here: http://everydaymindfulliving.com/is-your-child-ready-for-first-grade-in-1979/
As someone who really struggled with slowing down and being more mindful up until recently, I’d actually say it was easier to find ways to add to my income. Not being busy (or even overcommitted) had always been a bad thing in my mind. However, I do think that frugality can make a bigger difference. It’s probably also a lot more sustainable once the habit is formed. I was putting in a lot of extra hours for the past two years as a tutor (great side hustle!), but I had never been so tired. I could feel myself burning out. Now that I’m working on simplifying and spending more mindfully, I could definitely see this as a sustainable lifestyle that will pay off greatly.
I like the connection you make between spending money / owning stuff and time. I value nothing more than my time, and that’s one reason I tend toward minimalism. Nearly everything I buy takes time, not only during the acquisition process, but forever. Individual items may take minute increments of time, but those increments add up to a lot of fun I’m missing or time spent on earning more cash!
Addition by subtraction – I like it! However, there’s another way to think about it. I agree that cutting back on your workload, especially in the unnecessary aspects, is important, but there’s also something to be said about picking up additional streams of income WHILE you’re pinching pennies. It can go hand in hand. When you’re out hustling or working that second job or writing or doing whatever you need to do to enhance income, then at the same time you AREN’T spending money. Whereas, if you create a ton of free time, the temptation to spend always seems to creep in!
-DP