“M” Is For Money
The M in our MISSION is for “money”. Yes, it’s the obvious place to start learning about finance… so it’s tempting to skip over it, just like you may have skipped over that quote at the top.
Don’t!
Money is all around us, so we think we know what it is, but we don’t. It’s a tricky, slippery thing, that we struggle to get into our hands, and hope to get into our savings and portfolio before it slithers off, almost under its own power, into someone else’s hands. Sure, we’ll have got something for it, maybe, but probably not something that we would have valued as highly as the time we spent working to get the money.
Time and Energy…
That’s one of the things money is, or rather, represents: time.
The time we take out of our life to make the money. The time that other people take out of their lives to make the things we want and give them money for.
It’s not just time though. It’s energy too. You make money with a combination of time and energy, and when you buy something, you are often looking for someone else’s time and energy in place of your own.
You put your time and energy in, and you get someone else’s time and energy out. That time and energy is “represented” by money. It puts a number on that time and energy, and on someone else’s energy and time, and through that representation, it enables you to exchange.
It’s not just time and energy it helps us represent and exchange either. It’s everything else that life can be. It’s creativity, intelligence, passion, ideas… Just like Thoreau said:
“The price of anything is the amount of life you pay for it.”
Whatever has gone into your life, money can represent and help you exchange with someone else.
The Good News
The good thing about this is that it’s efficient. We can exchange time and energy for things that would have taken more time and energy for us to do. We can get things we’re not good at making. We can buy the product of ideas we would never have had, the creativity of designers we could never replicate. This is one of the reasons the world is as great as it is, as money helps us benefit from the efficiency and genius of other people.
The Bad News
Yeah. The bad news. The bad news is that money doesn’t look like time and energy. It looks like little circles, or bits of paper with pictures of dead people on them. Or little electronic numbers on a computer screen.
It looks so trivial, so unimportant. It becomes so easy to think that it isn’t important. That something real is more important. That anything real is more important.
And so, after all the effort we put into making the money, we put almost no effort into not spending it. We buy fashions we don’t like next week. We buy beer that gives us a headache next day. We buy gadgets to impress people who still don’t look at us. We buy make-up to cover-up bad skin that no one else can see, while making it worse. We smoke. We over-eat. We spend weeks of savings on meals that last hours. We spend months of savings on a week of holiday.
And then it’s gone. We can’t spend the money twice. That part of our life is gone.
The Better News?
The get-out from this is that money can work for itself. By good investing, money can make its own money. It can even, over time, double and quadruple. You need to make some, save some, spend less and then invest it well to make that happen – that’s why those are the stages of our MISSION.
So what do you need to do to be Happy Ever After?
Think about your own attitude to money. Think about whether you like working for your money, or if you want it to work for you instead. Think about whether you think hard enough about your reasons for spending it, or whether you’re just happy to let it slip away.
Don’t let your life slip away…