Day 26 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Identify Your Money Dials

3 minute read

What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 26: Identify Your Money Dials

The concept of Money Dials is something that I learned about last year from listening to a bunch of different podcasts with Ramit Sethi. Money Dials are those things that you love to spend money on. I love the way that Ramit teaches it because he starts with having you imagine what it would be like if you could turn up the dial and spend ten times more on the things that you love.

Take a second to really do that. What would it be like to spend ten times more on travel, cars, your home, luxury, experiences, or whatever it is that you love to spend money on. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?

What Ramit teaches next is to spend extravagantly on those things while continuing to be able to save 20-30% of your income by cutting your spending mercilessly on everything else. He says that doing this will allow you to live YOUR Rich Life without worrying about what others think or what their definition of their Rich Life is.

This exercise of identifying your Money Dials gives you the freedom to spend more on those things and helps you to identify where you should be cutting back your spending so that you can do so.