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How To Save Money During A Sale

A Rich Life With Less Stuff – The Minimalists

" Imagine your life a year from now.  Two years from now.  Five years from now.  What’s it gonna look like?  Imagine a life with less.  Less stuff, less clutter.  Less stress and debt and discontent.  A life with fewer distractions.

Now imagine a life with more.  More time, more meaningful relationships.  More growth and contribution.  A life unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you.  Well, what you’re imagining is an intentional life.  It’s not a perfect life, it’s not even an easy life, but a simple one.

What your imagining is a rich life.  The kind of rich that has nothing to do with wealth."

- Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus (The Minimalists)

How to Make Work-Life Balance Work by Nigel Marsh

"And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like." - Nigel Marsh, author of Fat, Forty and Fired

Video Link : Nigel Marsh - How to Make Work-Life-Balance Work

Some Quotes :

On Work-Life Balance :

So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.

Four Observations on Work-Life Balance:

1. The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. 

2. The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation.

3. The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours' work. Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. Do another three hours' work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. How often do you think I have that day? We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left."  A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long. There's got to be a middle way.

4. Fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- and said, "Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day. All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym." Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life -- there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches.

Minimalism, Love of Reading and Nigel Marsh

One funny comment about this blog that I heard was, "So Ria, it's fascinating that you really only talk about one topic in this blog!" Well, yeah ... this is a blog and not a journal... and to the people closest to me, they would know that I like to compartmentalize the different areas of my life [what can I do...It's the German influence ;)].

However, in this post, I would deviate from talking about more than one topic; I will talk about not just minimalism but also about my love of reading. I have always believed that whenever there is a question that bothers me or anything that I am curious about; someone else would have probably written about it. I mean in the grand scheme of things, my needs and worries are really infinitesimally small. 

Now, when I started getting serious about this minimalism thing, which is around the time I turned forty last October 2014; I researched actively on books/e-books, blogs, videos and websites that could help me. In that research, I was introduced to this lovely, lovely community of people and/or kindred spirits who paved the way for me in this most significant journey of my life. These kindred spirits are writers and advocates for minimalism; for making life more meaningful and for making this world a slightly better place. 

Some of those writers and/or advocates are :

1. Joshua Becker (becomingminimalist.com)

2. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus (theminimalists.com)

3. Ashley Riordan (Essays on Minimalism)

4. Colin Wright (exilelifestyle.com)

5. Leo Babauta (zenhabits.net)

And lastly and my personal favorite, Nigel Marsh (nigelmarsh.com), author of these books which has the funniest titles and I think hits a little bit too close to home.They are :

1. Fat, Forty and Fired (which he has sent me a copy of , because I am unable to buy from the Kindle Store, so generous and sweet).

2. Overworked and Underlaid (hmmm...'nuff said...)

3. Fit, Fifty and Fired Up (which I bought in appreciation of his kind gesture of sending me a signed copy of the first book)

Through Mr. Nigel Marsh's work, I realized that this journey towards minimalism, work life balance and finding meaning in my life need not be too serious; that we don't need to be preachy and that being the funniest person in the room is oftentimes better than being the most famous, the richest, the most well dressed or the smartest. 

For the next few posts, allow me to share with you Nigel's words of wisdom injected with his own brand of humor. His Ted Talk on Work Life Balance has earned 2.6 million views. You gotta love the guy. 

Superheroes Don't Need Capes

"If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
- William Morris

Very Recently, I was asked, how do you apply minimalism to keepsakes. In general, whether we are talking about keepsakes or just any item that we have, I think William Morris's rule can still apply. Now, whether that rule is 50/50 or only 1% useful and 99% beautiful, at the end of the day that is up to the individual to decide what works for them.

The retail price of something when we purchase them does not represent the full price of the item. What sometimes people forget is the "hidden cost" of things. The total cost of ownership for anything would always include the "cost" of sorting, storing and cleaning them, sometimes even some sort of periodic maintenance or upkeep is warranted. Now for every amount of time and effort devoted to doing these activities; be mindful that this is time and effort that is deducted from creating experiences and nurturing relationships. I mean do we really want to spend valuable vacation time just cleaning? I don't think so.

I think a funny analogy (or metaphor?) to this rule on utility and beauty, is the feisty character of Edna Mode, from the movie The Incredibles. When Mr. Incredible asked her to design a new suit for him, she was adamant that there will be NO CAPES ! This is due largely to the fact that quite a number of superheroes were killed when their capes got caught in jet turbines, elevators, missiles etc.

Capes are beautiful, but it's not essential for doing real superhero work. And as much as possible, we don't want distractions from being the beautiful superheroes that we are.

Life Edited...More on Graham Hill

Video Link : Less Stuff, More Happiness - By Graham Hill

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One of my favorite TED Talks from Graham Hill the founder of lifeedited.com and treehugger.com.

In this talk he suggests that there's a better way to live this life. That less might actually equal more.

In summary, he proposes that there are three approaches on how to have less stuff but more happiness:

1. Edit ruthlessly-- We've got to clear the arteries of our lives. We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. We want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff.

2. Small is Sexy. We want space efficiency. We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not the rare event. We want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized.

3. Have multifunctional spaces and housewares--a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table that becomes a bed etc.

Finally, let's take a second and ask ourselves, "Could I do with a little life editing? Would that give me a little more freedom? Maybe a little more time? "