Wealthy Life: Is our view of Work, Money & Wealth flawed?

Do we live Wealthy Lives?

Does Work rule more of our lives than we would like to admit to?

Is our approach to Education & Money right?

Would you want to live a Wealthy Life? I would think most people would say yes to that question. It would depend on how we define what a Wealthy Life is of course. Its a term not used very often but sounds glamourous enough that most of us, if not all, would want a part of that. The first thing that comes to mind when you say Wealthy Life is having lots of Wealth, which effectively equates to lots of Money.

But that is just one aspect of a Wealthy Life and not the only that we refer to in the context of this post. If you look at the term in a more wholistic way, a Wealthy Life is one where you have the resources (money in our world) to do the things that you want to or a passionate about.

Unfortunately a lot of us do not live Wealthy Lives, in fact most of us do not. Generally, its because life gets in the way and when you look at that closer, it comes down to what we do for most of our lives that comes in the way.

What Do We Educate Ourselves & Work For?

Wealth, Money and Finance are topics that the majority of us don’t really talk about or spent too much time thinking about. And that’s fair enough, as there is a lot more to life than just Wealth, Money and Finances right? But then if you look at what most of us do, we live most of our lives around Money. Most of us would find that statement outrageous, as we don’t want to be seen as slaves to Money or Finances.

We are humans and we live our lives as we want to! Money or Finances are not constructs that define or dictate us, most definitely not. How dare anyone suggest that!! But hold that thought while paint the picture at a high level and lets see where this takes us….

So we go to school/college for 10+ year, then some of us move on to University for 3-5 years of our lives. And after 15 years or so of learning, we are meant to be ready for life. That’s what most of us do and that is what is ingrained into generations of us. That is the way it is and if you want to make it in life, you need to do the hard yards to get set yourself up for life.

Some of us may not go to College or University for that matter but would then train for some kind of job, as an apprentice or simply by starting to work. All this is meant to be contributing towards a long and fulfilled wealthy life.

The point I am making is that we spend about the first 15 or so years (say starting from 5 to about 20 years of age) preparing, learning, understanding and deliberating, all in preparation for some kind of job or business. Now one might say, we don’t go to school, college or university to just get a job or start a business or just to make money. That is partly true, we do go to school, college or university to learn, to develop our minds, to challenge ourselves, to interreact with other humans and a whole lot more. There is no denying that there are several benefits of going to school, college and university.

But then let me put this to you. What would you say to your child or a young person who has spent 15 years going through school, college and/or university and then says “that’s it, I have done my 15 years of education, now its time for me to sit back and relax and do nothing more now, till the sunset years of my life!”. Might I suggest, there will be many parents, grandparents and generally adults who will probably have a few exemplary words to say to said child or young person??

So then, if the argument is that school, college and/or university is mainly for general education & knowledge, why be hard on the poor kid that just wants to take it easy after 15 years of assignments, grumpy teachers, annoying peers, getting up early every morning and all the disagreeable things about life as an educatee (if there is such a word)?? Parents should be proud that their kids spent 15 years becoming the Einstein that they wanted their kids to be and should leave it at that.

Don’t be bitter about all the money you put into your kids education, forget about all those taxi services you offered to school and extracurricular activities. Your kids have come out a well studied and educated individual, now let them enjoy the rest of their lives (which you may have to fund btw)!

The key point of the ramble above is not to try to be a stand-up comedian (I am told I would be terrible and I agree) but its to make us all (including myself) think and question our general approach to life as a whole, particularly in the light of Work, Money & Finances. Although these are three words that not many talk about and some think they are downright bad words, the fact of the matter is that we spend most of our lives working to get money to provide for ourselves and out families.

You may be someone working at a supermarket checkout, or someone cleaning the supermarket, or someone who works in the supermarket corporate head office, or someone who actually owns the supermarket. Regardless, you are working at the supermarket as you want to get the money you need to buy the necessities (food, shelter, clothing) and luxuries (cars, holidays etc) that you need and want. You really can’t argue it any other way. Is that contributing to a Wealthy Life?

We Spend Most Of Our Lives Working For Money, is that a Wealthy Life?

I am sure some will say “we work because we love it, its our passion”. Well to those I say “how many days will you stay passionate if you were not paid Money for your work?”. Unless you are someone who has enough Money or Wealth to be able to work for free for a cause that you are passionate about, an overwhelming majority of us will be working to make Money at the end of the day. Some will like their work, some may even enjoy or LOVE it but take the Money away from the equation & lets see how many show up to work the next day! I would hazard to guess, not many, if any….

So if we take the marketing, emotion, PR and hype away from all, the baseline is that we all Work for Money in some shape or form at its most basic level. And to get to the stage of working for Money, we spend a good 10-15 years studying for it, then another 40-50 years working for that Money. So, about 50 to 65 years of our lives are effectively spent on some sort of work for money.

That, to me, is a rather significant chunk of our lives, would you not agree? Now to put this into perspective, I had to do some research about how long we all live on average. Without spending half my life researching it, I found something on Wikipedia that has a list of life expectancy per country according to the World Bank group. A brief review of the table suggests most countries have a life expectancy between 65 and 85 years of age, depending on the gender.

So if we took the higher number (without any real science), it would mean that I may live to 85 years of age. And taking into account our extensive research above, we spend about 65 years of our lives (at the top end) learning and working to make Money to live. So according to my high school math, that is around 76% of our lives on working for money. Which by any measure is a significant amount of our lives spent on working, to obtain money, to live.

Should We Plan Our Working Lives, If We Spend Most Of Our Lives Working?

Now if we spend that much of time doing one fundamental thing, do you think we would equally spend some time to planning and understanding how to do this one important thing in our lives? Well you would think one would spend a lot of time planning, training , understanding and learning how to do this thing in the best and most efficient manner. Almost like say you were getting ready for a sport game, you would prepare & train in advance to make sure you get the best shot at the game. So how do we, as most humans, prepare for the biggest and longest game of our lives..working for money?

I don’t know about you but I did the best part of sweet nothing preparing for my epic journey into learning and working for money to build my life and the life of my future family. Yes, I admit I did not much out of the ordinary to plan, prepare or train for this great money making journey of mine. I just did what I was told to do, go to school, go to University, get good grades, get a job, work, collect the money, keep working, collect some more money….and repeat till the end of life.

And for over 20 years, I did the same, what most of us do. Stumbled through work, spent a lot of the money I earned and hoped that I would one day have money so I did not have to go to work with the ‘wonderful’ people that I often worked with. I did not think there was another way, although I had read that there was but automatically assumed that was for the super wealthy only. I even turned to hoping I would get a Lottery, so that the Sunder evening blues of returning to work on Monday would go away forever.

But alas, I did not win any lottery, often simply because I could not get myself to actually spend money on buying a ticket (just not a gambler by nature). But I still held on to the dream that one day, things would change and I would get out of this work/money rut and live the life that I had dreamed about, ever since I started working.

I just did not understand why, even though I did all the things I was told, I was not living a dream life. I went to school, college and then to University. I got reasonably good grades (miraculously) and secured a decent job in an industry that paid above average (consulting & technology). I also dabbled in investing, as I thought that was the secret sauce that I was missing. I bought shares, I even bought a small property.

But even with all the magic of good grades, good job, investing and property, I was still stuck in the same work and money rut for 20 or so years and I just could not understand why or what I was doing wrong.

At one low point after 20 years of this magic, I started getting more actively interested in finding a better way or doing something different. I had heard the old clichés about doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I knew I was going mad but did not think I was actually insane. So I decided to see what I can do about it and started taking an active interest in reading and learning more about finance, money & investing.

It took a few years of research, reading, giving up, getting interested again before I finally dragged myself to actually putting together a very basic plan and implementing some change. What I did and how I made the change itself is the subject of another later blog post but the point is that I finally convinced myself that change was required to break the cycle.

Maybe There Is A Better Way To Live A Wealthy Life?

What this self discovery did reveal to me was that most of us are brought up to think in one way and approach life in a certain expected way, with no understanding of what it might mean for us and how it would shape our life. There is also no real thought or concept of living a Wealthy Life, in all aspects of the term. I realised after a long long stint in terrible and stressful corporate jobs, that the approach was fundamentally flawed to start off with. And perhaps there is a better way to start the journey of life, work and money, especially for the next generation….

The main aim of this website and the blog posts is to explore better ways of living wealthy lives and challenging the norm, as the norm does not seem to be working for a lot of us, it sure did not for me. The overall intent is to create building blocks of finance and wealth so that we don’t have to spend all our lives working for money but instead live our lives doing the things that we want to do. Money seems to restrict our lives for most of our lifespan, generally only allowing most people to be free to do what they want to in their retirements years.

The issue with that is that some people don’t get to their retirement years unfortunately, some people get there with not much money to do anything and some people have health issues that restricts them. So instead of waiting till we are old to do the things we love, is there a way to do these things during the course of our lives, well before we pass the retirement age of 65 or 70?

So then, what exactly is a Wealthy Life?

The reference to a Wealthy Life is not just founded on having tons of money, so you can swim in it. The meaning is deeper and more wholistic. Money has a place in life and does contribute quite a lot to your quality of life. However, having a lot of money does not really mean you will be living a Wealthy Life. Take for example a high flying executive of a fortune 500 company. From the outside, most of us will see a very successful individual who not only has the money but the power and a level of fame as well. So surely this individual would be seen as living a wealthy life?

Well, the answer really lies in how that individual is living life. Yes he or she would be considered living such a life if money, power and fame were not the only things that ruled his or her life. As another example. how about a financially independent individual of similar age. This individual may not have as much money, power or fame as the executive mentioned above. However, its highly likely that this individual is doing other things with hir or her time that are seen as valuable in his or her life context. So a Wealthy Life does depend on the definition you attribute to it.

In Conclusion, There Has To Be A Better Way..

Well there has to be a better way as there are some people who have seemingly worked it out and are living the life they choose to live. You see articles in the news sometimes of individuals and families living envious lives, so if they have figured it out, surely we can. The next blog post ‘Is Financial Independence The Enabler Of A Wealthy Life‘ explores the possible alternative paths we can take for Financial Independence and a Wealth Life lived as we choose.