Choose quality over quantity, buying the best you can afford; save something every month; and live within your means.
These are the three most useful pieces of money management advice I have ever been given and that I intend to pass on to my children. Put together, they ensure you live as well as you can in the present and build a safety net for the future, while avoiding debt. I am, of course, aware that it is a privilege to be able even to think in terms of quality purchases and savings, but the simplicity of these rules makes them flexible and therefore widely applicable. “Living within your means”, in particular, means something very different to each of us, and has indeed meant something different at various stages of my life. Essentially, what I find universal about these pieces of advice is that they boil down to being mindful of how you spend money and careful to use it in ways that enhance, rather than complicate, your life.
Time, energy, attention
Of course, money is not the only finite resource we would be wise to budget well and spend (or save) mindfully. We use the verb “to spend” when talking about how we use our time. We say we are “spent” when all our energy has been burned up. And we are increasingly aware that in an attention economy, what we choose to look at, read and absorb (often from the internet) is yet another form of expenditure.
So, what would it look and feel like to live within your means not just financially, but also in terms of how you spend your limited time, energy and attention?
1. Time is of the essence
Our time on Earth is finite and brief. Much of how we use our time is dictated either by the human condition or by the rules of our society and culture. We have to sleep and eat a minimum amount to stay alive, for example, and most of us have to devote a significant portion of our time to paid work. However, almost all of us have some time each day to spend as we see fit, and this is where our financial advice becomes applicable. How often do we ask too much of ourselves, attempting to dash from work, cram in a medical appointment after the school run then charge home to make dinner and get the kids to bed before squeezing in a run/phone call/more emailing? How often do we over-commit our evenings and weekends to the point where we’re too busy to sleep and eat properly?
Living within your means in terms of time means being realistic about how much time you can give to the various demands made of you and still feel good afterwards. During a very busy period work at the end of last year, I often found myself with back-to-back appointments, my diary a sea of colour (each representing a different type of activity or client) with little to no white space between the blocks. My schedule looked like a wall of multicoloured lego, and the very sight of it was exhausting; I had no free time to get through the administration involved in running a business, and I wasn’t factoring in sufficient preparation. Feeling frazzled, I talked with two close friends who helped me give myself permission to say no to things and consider unfilled slots in my diary as necessary rather than self-indulgent. We do not have to fill every moment of the day; we are allowed to keep some empty spaces in our diaries to ensure we stay within a level of busy-ness that leaves us feeling stimulated rather than burnt out and time poor.
2. Even the Energizer Bunny tires eventually
When it comes to where we put our energy, we have more choice and control than we often admit. Energy management begins with knowing what your energy vampires are – what drains you – and what, inversely, boosts you. It’s as simple as good old double-entry book-keeping, debit and credit. Once you know how people, places and activities affect you, you can make more mindful decisions about where you put your energy as you’ll have a better idea of how much you have to spend. When you know the day will leave you feeling drained, you can plan your evening accordingly. On a bigger scale, if a massive work project requires two weeks of late nights, you can be self-aware enough to ensure you schedule a day off, or a very quiet weekend at the end of the rush period.
Contrary to what seems to be the popular belief, the aim is not to end each day completely “spent” and exhausted. It’s not about emptying your account and maxing out your credit card but calculating carefully how much energy you can reasonably spend and still leave something in the bank. A yoga teacher once told me that, when holding a balance pose for a long time, I should never go to my outer edge of resistance but always keep enough energy to leave the position with grace and control. Living within your means in terms of energy is exactly that: budgeting the use of your energy wisely and well, and ensuring that you have enough left over at the end of the day to finish it with some degree of elegance and poise.
3. What are you paying attention to?
By now, most of us are familiar with the (variously attributed) saying regarding social media platforms: “If you’re not paying, then you are not to the customer, you are the product.” We know that if companies are not trying to get us to part with our cash in exchange for their product, then the product they are selling to their customers, the advertisers, is our attention. They compete for it, making money from how often we look at their websites, how long we stay, how much we click… And this is just one demand on our attention. We also have more cultural options than ever before: along with the traditional museums, cinemas, theatres and books, we now have a multitude of streaming platforms all vying for our attention. The co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, famously said that the company’s biggest competitor was not other platforms but sleep. And let’s not even start thinking about all the WhatsApp, email, Teams, and text message notifications.
Like our money, time and energy, our attention is a finite resource; of the four, I find it is the easiest to squander. It’s all too easy to let another episode play automatically, or to scroll just a few minutes more. Sometimes, of course, a good series binge or a half hour looking at cat videos or pictures of aspirational kitchens is exactly what you need, but it’s only satisfying if it’s indulged in mindfully – by choice. But life is too short to finish a book you’re not enjoying, see the second half of a dreadful play, stay for the whole party when you hate it, or plough through to the end of an atrocious film. (Yes, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, I’m looking at you.) It’s important to remember that how we spend our attention has a significant and immediate impact on how we feel. The images, words, music and ideas we consume influence our perception of the world and have the power to make us feel better or worse, energised or drained.
Living within our means in terms of our attention isn’t so much about consuming less, although some would argue that is not a bad idea. I know the less I am exposed to screaming advertisements and clickbait headlines, the happier I feel. It’s more about making sure that we give our attention to things that serve us, bringing us closer to the people we want to be, the lives we aspire to live. We cannot watch every new series, take in every exhibition, keep up with every trend, follow every news story. We have to – or rather – we get to choose. Living within our means is about directing our attention to things that nourish us and improve our lives.
We have many different resources available to us in life, few of them are infinite. Just as we budget our hard-earned cash, so we can choose to spend our limited time, energy and attention in ways that favour quality over quantity, hold a little back for tomorrow, and ensure we are never in the red.
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