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Invest in thyself: 3 ways to spend money that will make you better
Where do you spend your money? Besides bills and other adult responsibilities, where do you find yourself shedding dollars on the regular?
I, too, have been guilty. I’ve complained about how much money I don’t have and, in the same breath, called up a homie to go break the bank at the bar or budget for iTunes and Netflix. For as much as we say we want our dreams to come true, how much is that represented in our spending power?
The average household spends an average of $3,008 per year on dining out according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports and Harvard Business Review researcher Eddie Yoon found that only 10 percent of consumers professed a love of cooking.
What that means is that we’re not nearly as broke as we claim to be; we just don’t invest in the right things. Eating habits are just one example of corners we can cut to be cost-effective and shows how, regardless of what we say, we all undoubtedly have resources that can be invested more efficiently.
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I’ve seen people perform miracles to get the hottest shoes out and sell their soul to attend a concert, but won’t pay for a coding class or save up to get a better operating camera.
The fact of the matter is that we simply do not invest in ourselves enough. There is ample opportunity to better ourselves and in ways that are financially inconsequential.
Taking time to cultivate our gifts and talents is a responsibility that far too many of us do not take seriously enough. How else do we become our best selves?
You can even go as far to say that investing in self is a form a self-care; and how can we expect others to take care of us — in any vein — if we do not take care of ourselves?
Investing in yourself yields the best return. Here are some examples of how easy it is.
Invest in your health
A lot of times when people think of the gym, self-absorbed meatheads, CrossFit fanatics and other extremes come to mind, but in reality, it can also be for those who simply want to maintain.
Every day, there are thousands who invest in their marijuana habit over a gym membership or in their weekend movie ritual over a diet plan or their wardrobe over self-educating.
If more of us simply put some hard cash toward our bodies, not only will we meet those body goals that have always seemed elusive, but it would clear our heads and make us better operating humans.
Our health is as important as our vices, our sweet tooth and our love for fashion.
Invest in your profession
Creatives who don’t invest in themselves are creatives who don’t believe in their craft.
Whether you’re a musician, graphic artist, writer, event planner etc., there are ways to enhance and upgrade your craft. Yet, every day you see an artist complain about what they don’t have instead of making ways to obtain it.
As a creative, recreational money should be art money — they are one of the same.
You cannot cry about the hardship of working eight hours a day and only having time to create on the weekend while simultaneously not putting the revenue toward that said dream.
Investing in our professions and dreams is as simple as making a weekly commitment and slowly working towards that goal. The MacBook you’ve always wanted may be a little expensive up front, but not if you refrain from nightlife for a season.
That new camera may seem unreasonable, but surely it’s worth not looking fly.
Invest in a new skill
Somehow, we’ve been convinced that education stops when we receive our degrees as if a formal education is the only place we can gather information or the only place worth spending money for knowledge. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
As long as you’re alive, there is going to be something to be learned. Technology, trends and the state of society changes from generation to generation — there really isn’t any room to be content with what we’ve learned or to be stagnant in our understanding.
From coding to video editing, if we were to invest in information and skillsets, we’d not only expand our understanding but we’d be making ourselves more marketable. It’s all about placing ourselves in the mind frame of self-improvement, and it’s relatively cost-effective.
Often times we look at where we’re not and where we want to go and what we want to accomplish and we feel stuck, but there’s so much we can do in where we currently are.
There are always ways to improve and grow, it’s just a matter of exercising our money in order to do so. When we invest in ourselves, we’re never going to lose.