Functionally Wealthy.
The importance of balancing the material with what really matters in life.
Who want’s to be a millionare?
When I first encountered this show, Chris Tarrant was the presenter. Participants would compete for a chance to sit opposite him and answer enough questions (hopefully correctly) to become a millionaire. That was in the early 2000’s. These days it costs a million pounds to buy a bar of chocolate!
But it does highlight something important. Our attachment to money.
If I asked you, would you like to be a billionaire? I’m guessing the majority of you would say yes, and if there was no work involved in acquiring it then probably all of you.
There have been many times when I have wanted to be wealthy in that way. A billionaire. I’ve tried and repeatedly failed to make money online for years and it was probably for the better because I realised some things in the process.
Almost everyone is trying to scam you.
Google “How to make money online” and you will for the forseeable future be flooded with adds from people telling you you can make money in your sleep with absolutely no risk if you just sighn up to their course for only £50!
So, obviously I used to sign up right away (Yes, I was that stupid). Later I realised these ‘gurus’ all had one thing in common.
The primary (or usually only) way they make their millions is by teaching nieve people like me and (hopefully not) you is by selling courses on how to make money. They don’t actually use the methods they teach in their courses themselves, if they even teach anything at all that is. Sometimes they just perpetually hype you up into thinking you’re just about to learn THE secret to “financial, time and geographical freedom”.
Freedom. That’s the hook. Or at least it was for me. My 3 favorite things in life are freedom, peace and quiet.
Eventually though, I resigned myself to the idea that I would not be able to make omney online unless I was willing to scam people (which I’m not) or unless I already had millions to invest in big companies and so, focused on being happy with my dayjob.
I work in retail and it is fulfilling at times. The people are lovely, but I still want my freedom! The problem is, freedom costs a lot of money.
Functionally infinite money.
I think what people are trying to say when they claim they want to be millionaires or billionaires is really, “I want infinite money.”
Well guess what, you don’t need to be a billionaire, a millionaire or even a cent-thousandaire to have functionally infinite money.
All you need to do is consistently make more than you spend. If everyday, week or month you consistently make just 10% more than you spend regardless of how much you spend then you have infinite money or in other words, you always have more money than you need.
Now you will still have to put some kind of limit on how much you spend but I’m talking about living a normal life where you can have a family, a home and some cars and not have to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to pay the bills each month and not have to turn to credit cards or loans or overdrafts.
Why would you want to only be functionally wealthy instead of Elon Musk wealthy?
Because…
Some things matter more than money!
Family, memories, holidays, worship, friends, actually living your life instead of spending all your years working your ass off so that you can live.
There’s a very important distinction between working your butt off ‘for’ your family and actually spending time ‘with’ them.
There’s no point in doing the former if you’re not going to balance it with the latter.
Here’s another scam that isn’t intended to be a scam, genarational wealth. Instead of trying to make trillions so your children and grandchildren don’t have to worry about money, why not teach them financial responsibility and indipendence so that they can make as much money as they like on their own?
Adults are forged through struggle and hardship and failure. It’s how we learn. We try, we fail, we learn, we (hopefully) change and then we repeat the process hopefully improving at least slightly everytime.
Consider the following thought experiment I recently conducted on myself:
Picture yourself at the end of your life. You only have a few years left.
Imagine the way you are living now is the way you had lived for the rest of your life. Looking back, would you be happy with the life you lived?
For me, the answer was, absolutely not!
And that’s whats inspired me to drastically change my path in life.
But what would make you happy looking back on your years?
Giant yatchs, mansions and fast cars? Are you sure?
There’s plenty of people with everything in the world who are still depressed and lonley.
There’s plenty of people with nothing who are happier than pigs in you know what.
And yes, the opposite is also true. There are people in the world who are exceptionally wealthy who are happy and people who have nothing who are depressed, lonley and at times, suicidal.
What do the happy people have in common? More often than not, it’s family & friends.
And when these people are approaching the final years of their lives, they can look back in happiness with hearts full of joy because of all the memories they’ve made with the people they love.
That, is what really matters at the end of the day. After religion and a connection to The Creator of course.
So whats the lesson here?
Don’t give money any more importance than is due to it. Remember what really matters in life and make enough money to live comfortably and be able to help others.
If you can make more while still maintaining a good balance with the other aspects of faith faith and family then go ahead.
Obviously, I’m not telling you how to live your life. THis is just an opinion piece.
Thanks for reading this post! Hopefully you enjoyed reading it or at least found it interesting. If you’d like to read more articles like this feel free to follow me on social media using the links on the homepage or below.
If you’d like to support my work feel free to share my posts or website on social media. If there’s a topic you’d like me to consider feel free to email me at peopleofthebook601@gmail.com
Also, I have a poetry book! It’s published here on Amazon and free to read if you’re a kindle unlimited subscriber. Kindle unlimited authors get paid based on how many pages are read.
Alternatively you can buy the ebook for £1.99 from the UK site, the prices will vary if you’re in a different part of the world.
I’m giving 50% profits to charity: 25% Palestine and 25% to the Uyghur Muslims of Turkestan. A further 25% of profits will go towards other projects i’m working on that will raise more money for people in need.
Gmail: peopleofthebook601@gmail.com