Build The Life You Want, Then Save For It

Build the life you want, then save for it. It’s a simple phrase that I loved from the moment I read it, and it’s something I find myself re-visiting often.

Read through this post on Reddit’s Financial Independence forum, which popularized the phrase. It’s a cautionary tale for those of us chasing financial freedom.

Now that you’ve come so far, I think it’s important to take a step back and critically evaluate your relationship with money. Having gone down the path of learning about, controlling, and ultimately amassing money, you might find that saving more and more money becomes a goal onto itself — an obsession even.

It seems ludicrous to caution someone against saving too much money, but it can and does happen (the post linked above is just one of many examples).

When you seek money as an end goal rather than a tool to achieve something else, it can lead to unhealthy habits. Checking investment account balances daily; declining invitations from friends and family to avoid spending on food & drink; cutting out hobbies that you deem “too expensive”; making yourself unhappy to pad your bank balance.

To guard against this, I recommend adopting a “conscious living” mindset. At its core, this means living a life where all of your choices have been made deliberately.

Build The Life You Want

Try to imagine what a happy and satisfied life would look like for you, taking money entirely out of the equation.

Where do you live? What type of food do you eat? What clothes do you wear? What hobbies and passions do you have? How often do you travel and to where? In essence — if you didn’t have to work for money, what would you do with your time?

Some people might want to spend their days jetting from one continent to the next, others may want to stay at home reading and playing video games. Neither of those lifestyles is more virtuous or “better” than the other. They are both valid choices,

Keep an open and conscious mind and decide for yourself. If it’s what you want, it’s want you want. What anybody else thinks doesn’t matter one bit.

As much as possible, try to start building that life now. Take small steps towards the goal, starting today. Devote an hour or two each week to trying out a hobby you think you might be interested in. Plan a weekend hiking trip at your local mountain.

Perhaps you’ll find a passion that brings you real joy. And what if it’s expensive? So be it. Weigh the benefits to your happiness against the financial costs, then make a deliberate choice.

Spending money on things or experiences that make you happy is absolutely OK. Frugality is not an inherent virtue.

Don’t wait for a distant future to start building the life that you want. If you wait too long, you might find yourself rich, lonely, and bored.

Start to sketch it out now — you can fill in the details later.

Save For It

Before you buy a boat and sail off into the sunset, keep in mind the second half of the mantra — build the life you want, then save for it.

In the spirit of conscious living, we also need to be mindful of the financial impact of the decisions we make. The life that you’ve chosen for yourself has a price tag attached to it.

Saving up for the life you want might require a higher income, a delayed retirement, or cutting back on other expenses that don’t fit into your long-term plan.

Don’t kid yourself, if luxury vacations are a part of the life you want, you need to include that in your budget and save for it.

Once again, spending $20,000 a year isn’t necessarily “better” than spending $100,000 a year (or vice versa). The more expensive your lifestyle, the more money you’ll need to save up to sustain that lifestyle. And that’s fine.

Everyone is different — find out where you’d like to position yourself on the spectrum, and plan accordingly.

Say it with me one last time: build the life you want, then save for it.