Tha Minimists

Hello, Simpleton. What's up, y'all? Welcome to Minimist Podcast. We discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less. My name is Joshua Fields-Milber. And I'm Ryan Nicodemis. And together we are the minimalists.

Well, these are trying times, right? And the stock market is in a free fall at the time of this recording. We're going to talk about the economy today. We're going to talk about what it means to live in trying economic times. A lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck.

A lot of us can't scrounge enough money for an emergency. We don't have emergency funds. We're not saving for retirement. We are in times that are really challenging financially. And we're going to talk about what that means. And who better to talk about that with than our good friend T.K. Coleman?

Our economist expert. Our MVP. So T.K. you're with Fee, the foundation for economic education. You're directed over there.

And so you understand a lot about economics. And so I wanted to talk today. Try to live up to that billing.

Well, we really have some questions from our audience. This is a listener driven show. So I thought maybe we'd just dive right into some of these questions.

Our first one is from Jim and Flossmore, Illinois.

I'm interested in maximizing my standard of living, my wealth and quality of life while minimizing the cost of living. So I want to make sure I have the maximum amount of wealth and quality of life and standard of living as possible while minimizing the cost of living is minimalism a good strategy for this.

It sounds to me like what Jim is asking here is quite often we actually can flate wealth with well being. And we can we can flate net worth with self worth.

And these are two separate things. It doesn't mean you have to be against money to be to be for well being. But when we just put money first or we think it's the only part of the equation, then we I think we run into trouble.

And we notice this on a broader scale too with the economy at large. We we have when we are focused only on the stock market, for example, maybe the stock market isn't isn't the best measurement for for well being necessarily.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Let's talk to Jim about this.

So how does minimalism help his well being how does it help his and in part and part of our income and part of our net worth. I would argue that up to a certain extent does help our our well being.

And I think with minimalism like what the first thing I thought of was how I have taken this philosophy of mindfulness of living deliberately of whatever you want to call it whatever is immune you want to put behind it.

Mariah and I we are debt free. And I'm not saying that you have to be debt free to be a minimalist. But that is that is what Mariah and I have strive for in simplicity and being deliberate has gotten us there. And I'll tell you that this with the coronavirus. Yeah, like Josh and I we've got set IRAs.

I've got money in betterment with index funds. I even have like some individual stocks that I've played around with with Tesla. I don't even want to go into the amount of money that I've lost over the last month or maybe just two weeks even.

It's been an appreciable amount. I'm talking like it's just a lot. So I can look into me or though. And I can say because I'm debt free.

I don't have to sit here and worry about going out and making as much money as I can to make all these debt payments. I can I can truly look at it and I can and I am privileged enough I want to I want to be very clear that I recognize how how fortunate and how privileged I am to look in the mirror and say it's just money.

And I think that is where this what was his name? Jim. I think this is where Jim is trying to get he's trying to get to a point where money is not a stressor for him. It sounds like maybe it's stressing him out right now. And sometimes when we feel that stress we start to put money first and we start to make that you know our number one problem.

But if we like Josh said if we make it at our number one problem will now we're just introducing a lot more problems.

I'm not a millionaire. I know some of them and they they tend to stress out more about money than most people I know who they check to pay check.

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