Personal Finances is Just Another Game to Play instead of Scary Thing !
A lot of people think that implementing personal finances in our daily life will bring us to desperate times because the scary imagination. For many people, thinking about personal finances are quite similar to dealing with rigid budgeting, sacrificing our hobbies, talk too far away of the future, hardly comparing household budget vs income, or even sacrifice our current life.
As a common basic sense, the most preferable thing for all people is a freedom, including freedom to spend our money for anything we like.
Yes, I really agree with this insight!
Just to summarize my basic idea of personal finances, let me back to several previous posts which already published.
First post Basic Personal Finances – Initial Road to be Rich ! emphasizes that definition of financial freedom or getting rich is different between one to another person, because any individual has unique perception about life and how to achieve our happiness, basic purpose of the life. It will take effect to someone’s perception about money and financial related matter.
Second post Start Your Step to Implement Personal Finances repeat the message once again, and then emphasizes to make financial goals based on needs, not desires. In this step, we try to keep ourselves in well-organized financial track rather than let ourselves out of control. Simply say, this way can make our money and assets becoming positive tool to achieve our personal basic purpose.
In other two posts Personal Finances – Let’s Determine Priority ! and Financial Advice – Systematic Personal Finance Budgeting, I tried to explain more about implementation of the first and second posts, and we were dealing with basic idea of household budgeting.
Before continuing with other future postings, I would like to well explain my basic idea about personal finances. In my point of view, personal finances including budgeting, saving, and all of the planning we make is supposed to be one of the way to make us happy, not the one which will hurt our life. Simple lesson of life, the final ultimate goal in our life is to enjoy the life itself. So – for example, too strict budgeting will bring us into suffering and eliminate our freedom to enjoy our meaningful life. The right thing to do is just make personal finance as a game to play, not a rigid guidance to follow.
But, on the other hand we cannot stick our steps on opposite side, spend our money without any planning and controlling. It seems valuable for short term, but in fact we go to another direction of life instead of long term happiness.
Actual fact, we need some personal finance management in our life, as a benchmark to pursue our main goal, but not as a rule which monitor our whole life. So that, personal finances is theoretically rigid, but should be implemented in flexible way to bring best result for our life.
So, how to make personal finances as a game ?
One simple example is about monthly household budgeting. Under some amount of current income, we can generate some amount of saving for short term or long term purposes. The rigid one is, we shall treat very strict saving for our short term, urgent, and important upcoming needs, since neglecting them will make us very suffer. If we cannot do that thing, means hard effort is needed to increase our monthly revenue.
On the other hand, we also have long term goals or purposes. We can be flexible enough with this kind of purpose. For some persons who love to do strict household budgeting, then strict budgeting is the choice. But other persons may be have another opinion regarding the way to enjoy life, so flexibility will make them enjoy.
If strict household budgeting seems hurts our life, we may think to implement flexible budgeting, by putting some month to month budget range. For example, we can averagely save 50 for our long term purpose, so just make a range between 40 to 60 or 35 to 65. May be this month we have some interesting things to do which needs extra budget, and we can allocate 10 or 15 more extra fund for our short term purpose. Next month, when we have less things to do, we can allocate more 60 or 65 budget into saving.
Implementing this way, we will feel personal finances as another interesting game to play, instead of tons of disgusting rule which burden our life.
Finally, just have a nice game !
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To me, it should be more than a game, it must be a right mindset.
A healthy personal finance begins with a right mindset, and the willingness to apply the basic discipline of budgeting and spending.
Thanks for the comment.
I do agree that right mindset is needed. The mindset is how to well organize financial aspects of current daily life (as you mentioned some of them, budgeting and spending) for list of financial purposes, isn’t it ?
And I’m sure, mostly people who has been dealing with revenues and expenses basically has this kind of general mindset. Otherwise, we will go to opposite direction and get suffers financially as the result.
I also agree that willingness to apply basic discipline is really needed to implement that mindset in our life.
The point of my idea is:
We cannot separate financial goals with whole life ultimate goal, which is specific from one to other person. As human being, every of us has specific own perspective of the life itself, and how to make our own life is worthy enough four us.
So, flexible implementation of personal finance planning is valuable thing to do. Placement of budgeting, saving, investing, and other personal finances guidance and theory as a map / tool to bring us pursue our own specific goals.
Placing personal finances as an object (tool) and ourselves as a subject, will drive us to the essence of personal finances basic purpose. Once we do it, then we will do with our heart, so that I call it “just a game”.
In contrary, implementing rigid personal finances and place it as a subject which regulates our daily life, seems more make us lost our main perspective instead of giving optimum benefit to our life.