The basic habits
We have all made mistakes and hopefully have learnt from them and then made completely different mistakes and hopefully learnt from them and thus the cycle continues.
As an athlete becomes better and stronger with training and good habits so hopefully shall we in our pursuit of financial stability with some basic skills or shall I say habits that one should incorporate in their daily lives.
- Respect
Start from home, look at the people around you and see how you treat them. How you treat other people says what kind of a person you are. Give respect to everyone until they do something to lose that respect but using bad language does not show professionalism nor strength or integrity. And it starts from home and builds into a strong character which your family and community appreciate and later leads into your work and the rest of your life.
Have respect for yourself also, don’t underestimate your capabilities. Learn a new skill, put yourself out there, age or sex should not be a barrier. Also look the part, no one is going to hire someone who does not look well-dressed or overdressed. Make it a habit rather than just doing it for interviews or special occasions.
- Flexible Order
Having order in your life is important but with flexibility for unseen circumstances and also to avoid boredom. Again start from home, if you are too lazy not to put things in its place at home, what happens when you face a problem at work and you just give up or too lazy to do it. Start small, tackle one task a day. For instance say you have a messy room.
Start by sorting out everything on the floor into piles like put all books on the floor onto the top of the bookshelf, put all clothes in the wardrobe or drawers and throw away the rubbish. Next day sort out the books in the bookshelves. Same thing in your life whenever you face a big mess at work or business, break them down in chewable small bits, the immediate urgent ones today and the less important ones the following day.
Furthermore one day when you are running your own business and for tax purposes need to show a certain expense, it will be filed exactly in the folder labelled as such thus saving you time because by than order would have become a habit.
- Money wise
You don’t have to be a maths genius but basic understanding of mathematics is important. Need to understand how to calculate profit, percentage returns and how much tax you need to pay. Having a job, a budget and savings will allow you to invest first in small amounts and later in bigger amounts. Also making cutting costs a habit will allow your savings to grow, thus having more to invest. Remember every dollar will make the difference.
- Fitness
A healthier body means a healthier mind and also helps cope with stress. Exercise is also a good way to let out all your anger and frustration and look at a problem with a fresher mind. All you need is 30 mins a day for exercise and around 30 mins a day to plan your nutrition for the day. No use exercising if what you are eating is full of sugar and empty calories.
- Be frugal
Look at the things you are buying, do you have to buy a gleaming $10,000 car which will depreciate in value every year by 10% or a $2000 car with chipped away paint.
My car is a 1995 rav4 2 door I bought for $2500 in 2013. I spend about $500 a year on it for maintenance like oil change etc. Only a single person so a small 2 door vehicle which does not use a lot of fuel is adequate. Can hire or borrow a trailer when rarely need to move bigger loads.
Same goes for grocery shopping, buying budget products can save you around $20 each shopping trip. When once I was living with flatmates I used to cook with, I filled all the empty expensive boxes of cereal, bread, jam etc. with budget products and my flatmates never knew the difference.
In the end, what I am trying to say is that in life everything starts from you. If you install the simplest good habits now and then keep developing them, one day you will get where you want to be.
Here is an exercise for you, grab a piece of paper and draw or paste a picture of what you want to look or be like in 10 years. Now draw lines down from it and for each line write down a specific attribute about the future you for instance, I have 3 houses returning 8% yield. Draw another line down to explain how you get there like saved $30k a year to buy the house and so on. Eventually, it may lead you to your basic step which is you got a job.
The first step is always the hardest, after that it becomes a habit and finally a mindset.