It’s pretty clear by now that I have a different relationship with money than when I started Get Rich Slowly. I’m by no means perfect with the stuff, but I’ve become firmly entrenched in the camp that sees money as a tool. (I used to see it only as a means to instant gratification.)<\/p>\n
Here’s a tiny example.<\/p>\n
Taking a page out of Trent’s book, Kris has been on a crock pot kick lately. This morning she tried a new swiss steak<\/a> recipe. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked before leaving for work. “Can you make some mashed potatoes to go with dinner?”<\/p>\n “Of course!” I said. I make awesome<\/i> mashed potatoes.<\/p>\n Well, as the day progressed, I became less enthused about the whole potato mashing process. As you might guess, it had something to do with The Book. Though I finished the manuscript last Friday, that’s not the end of the work. In fact, I’ve been buried in editing ever since.<\/p>\n This morning, I started editing the chapter on housing. I expected it take only four hours. Instead, it took seven. Next I rushed to start editing the chapter on taxes and insurance, but discovered it’s packed with problems that need to be fixed. I turned instead to the chapter on debt. More problems.<\/p>\n “I don’t have time to mash potatoes,” I thought. “I have to edit.”<\/p>\n And though I know this sounds strange, it was then that I had an epiphany. All these months and years, I’ve written about the notion of Money as a Tool, and I’ve sort of understood it intellectually. But it wasn’t until this moment that I actually knew<\/i> what the concept meant: It meant I was stopping by the supermarket to pick up some mashed potatoes!<\/p>\n It’s difficult to describe the relationship I used to have with money. It seemed like the ultimate objective. It was what I wanted. Yet I didn’t do anything to earn or save the stuff. Instead, I’d spend it without thinking. When I spent more than I could afford to buy comics and videogames, I got a little thrill. It felt like I was somehow cheating the system.<\/p>\n I know now that the only one I was cheating was me. It took me years to pay off the debt I racked up by “cheating”. Now I really do see money as a tool. Monetary wealth isn’t the goal. Happiness is the goal. Doing the things that make life meaningful<\/a> for me \u2014 reading, writing, spending time with friends \u2014 is the goal. Money is useful because it can help me do these things. Used wisely:<\/p>\n For me, the transition from using money for instant gratification to using it for bigger purposes has been a slow one. It took a long time to even realize how stupid I was being. After I became financially self-aware, it took a few years more to break my old habits, though I finally seem to be gaining some degree of self-control. (As I mentioned last week, I haven’t used money to buy anything on impulse yet in 2010. That amazes me.)<\/p>\n And I’ve reached a place in my life where I can buy mashed potatoes from the grocery store and not feel an ounce of guilt because I know I’m practicing conscious spending<\/a>.<\/p>\n Normally, I think of supermarket mashed potatoes as a sort of rip-off. For $3.99, you get a pound-and-a-half of mediocre spuds. For four bucks, I could make twenty<\/i> pounds of home-made mashed potatoes that taste much, much better. But was that $3.99 a rip-off today? Hell no! It was a bargain. That $3.99 bought me an extra 30 minutes to work on Your Money: The Missing Manual<\/i><\/a>. To me, that’s cheap.<\/p>\n Of course, there’s just one problem: I didn’t actually use that 30 minutes to work on The Book. I used it to write this blog post instead. Ah well. Sometimes the things you build with your tools don’t turn out the way you’d planned…<\/p>\n Postscript:<\/b> Kris and I have eaten dinner now. Her verdict? “These mashed potatoes are tasty<\/u>,” she told me. (For the record, I was unimpressed.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s pretty clear by now that I have a different relationship with money than when I started Get Rich Slowly. I’m by no means perfect with the stuff, but I’ve become firmly entrenched in the camp that sees money as a tool. (I used to see it only as a means to instant gratification.)<\/p>\n Here’s a tiny example.<\/p>\nMoney as a Tool<\/h2>\n
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$8 Per Hour<\/h2>\n