Optionality and Managing Your Fixed (or Growing) Expenses
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2020
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Wealth is not a dirty word. After all, wealth can allow us to do many interesting and fulfilling things with our lives. At the very least, it provides options, opening up the range of possibilities before us. Simply put, wealth can allow us to live the life we want to live.
The only problem is that the accumulation of wealth is often followed by increasing expenses. Some of these are obvious -- a bigger, newer house usually costs more than a smaller, older one -- while others are insidious. A larger house requires more energy to heat and cool, more time and effort to clean and landscape, and more things to fill it up. That's just one example. We could say the same about cars!
Left unchecked, these growing expenses can once again eat into our wealth, robbing us of the optionality of wealth. As Thoreau once wrote, "he who owns little is little owned."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Winebbers. My name is Jesse Meekum and this is podcast number 414 for |
| 0:08.9 | Wineb, where we teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to |
| 0:11.5 | paycheck, get out of debt and save more money. |
| 0:15.0 | Sometimes when we talk about saving money it's just because, but as we talked about in |
| 0:19.5 | December, living within your means is establishing an opportunity gap and that's not a bad |
| 0:25.2 | thing maybe I need to name it something else but an opportunity gap is a good thing that |
| 0:29.8 | gap between your income and your expenses, that is your means. And we all say that it takes |
| 0:36.2 | money to make money and we kind of say that maybe more as a victim, but it's absolutely true. |
| 0:41.7 | If you have money, you have an opportunity to make money |
| 0:44.5 | because you have something to risk. We also have that adage of no risk no reward |
| 0:49.4 | right? Well if you have nothing to, you have no possibility of reward. |
| 0:54.0 | If you have something to risk, you have the possibility. |
| 0:57.0 | So, as it relates to living within your means, |
| 1:00.0 | it's not just because it's some principle that sounds nice on paper. It's because it is what allows you to build wealth and building wealth is desirable. |
| 1:08.0 | Now if someone says, oh no, I'm not, I don't really like the way you you I don't really like that you said that |
| 1:13.0 | Jesse wealth desirable wealth is kind of icky I'll say it for you this way right now |
| 1:18.7 | you're you know you're worth whatever you're worth and I mean that totally |
| 1:22.4 | financially not your inherent worth, which is infinite. |
| 1:25.6 | So you've established that. |
| 1:28.8 | Would you like in 30 years to be worth more? If you would not, you're an anomaly and I'm not talking to you, but if you're |
| 1:36.6 | normal, like everyone else, yes, you would like to have made some financial progress in the meantime. |
| 1:41.6 | So when I talk about building wealth I mean it in the most |
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