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Examining ‘Ownership’

The first thing I wanna talk about is ownership. Examining ownership and we'll start with know what you own and why you own it. And one of the most prolific things that someone said to me when I was starting this journey is, do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? And oftentimes, we buy into this perception of what the American dream is or whatever dream it may be. What success is and we start buying things because things are somewhat of a reflection of our worth, and somewhat a reflection of our success but then, we get into the cycle where things begin to own us, and before we know it, we're working to pay bills. We're working to sustain a lifestyle that might not even be in alignment with where we are and a lot of it has to do with your money mindset, and how you got into that position, in the first place. So, we'll go into examining ownership and there are a few different types of ownership. So, for this, we'll talk about true costs and the different types of ownership ar...

e monetary, opportunity, and energy. A lot of people think about monetary costs, so that's, you know, the everyday. That's how much the goods you exchange. It costs you money and reflects, and the money you have available to spend or invest. So, the monetary cost is you go to the store, you buy a soda, or you buy a sofa, or whatever it may be, and that's how much money it costs you. So, vehicle equipment, your home, your mortgage, your rent, memberships. Those are monetary costs. Those are things that you feel the monetary impact, immediately. But then, there's opportunity costs and opportunity costs are the costs of a missed or unselected opportunity. How many of us have realized that we thought something was a great deal and then it was the opportunity cost associated? That's one of those silent ones, you know? So, opportunity costs such as employment, relationships, education, leisure. Those are different things that cost us different opportunities and it doesn't have to be a bad thing but there's always usually a trade off when you choose one decision over the other, and the opportunity cost is that trade off. And then, lastly, my favorite one is energy and that is the return on energy, or the emotional or physical impact of making a decision. So, we think about monetary, we think about opportunity, but we often don't think about energy in such as relationships, volunteering, and the things that, you know, the energy that it costs us that we can't get back. I mean, you can go to sleep but you can't get back hours in a day. Now, I think that energy is one of the most expensive costs because it's so much harder to get back your time than it is to make more money or to cancel out another opportunity. And so, what I want to do is assess your costs. So, we all have written out our expenses and so forth. So, you wrote out your expenses, or you wrote down, or you brought to the class your past three days' worth of expenses. I want you to have a look at those expenses and write down which one applies to the expense. Or, actually, most of them are gonna be monetary because you're looking at your bank statements and so forth but I want you to also think about any opportunity costs that you've incurred in the past few days, or any energy costs that you've incurred in the past few days. So, let's first look at your expenses and then, let's look at, think about opportunity costs and energy costs. Your opportunity costs, you can actually just write those down, kind of on a separate sheet of paper or your energy costs, anything that costs you energy. Just write those down. For those of you online, please make sure that you're doing this exercise, as well. So, you should hopefully have access to your three days of past expenses. If you don't, hopefully you have an online application for your bank or your financial institution. Have a look at those but then, also, on a separate sheet of paper, I want you to think about the opportunity costs. It might not even have been in the past three days, it might've been in the past week, might've been in the past month. Any notable opportunity costs, please put that in the chat box, or any energy costs, and I think that's my favorite one because a lot of people don't think enough, I don't think they think about the cost of energy enough, so I would love for you to share that, as well, in the chat box if it comes up for you. So, what are some of the opportunity, does anyone identify any opportunity costs that have, they've been forced to kind of reckon with over the past couple of days or the past week? I don't know if travel would be considered an energy cost? So, I've had a lot of that in the past three days. Yeah, and it takes a lot to get to the airport, and go through check out, check through, and then get your bags in there, and then get your bags back, and yeah. It definitely does. Especially the past couple of days, there have been quite a few delays at the airport, so yeah, energy, and that's time you can't get back. And don't forget to charge your phone and charge your computer when you get on the plane, and then they don't have chargers. Then you've just like lost productivity in everything. (laughing) Anyone else, any energy, opportunity costs? Do you have any online? Nothing online at the moment but I can personally say, just coming back from a vacation, that we did a road trip, and we made the decision to pay a bit more to save some of the energy, in terms of having to calculate, you know, how many miles we're doing, and pay per mile, and we were just like, you know, it could potentially cost us a little bit more but for the stress of it, we let that go. Saved the energy if that makes sense. (laughing) Did you guys purchase a plan ahead of time or something like that? Kind of like a road... Yes, so they had different options of how we could hire a car, what kind of car hire we wanted, whether you would pay in advance for mileage or when you drop the car off, so. So that was like, do you wanna worry about it and stress about it, or do we wanna just have it all included? Yeah, I mean, there's opportunity, so that's monetary costs that you're paying more money for that convenience but the opportunity return on energy is that you're not putting that time into figuring out what makes sense. Like, somebody else has already done the work. I'm the queen of like, buying pre-planned itineraries. I think it saves me time. Hopefully, it saves me money, too, as well, because sometimes they have good budgeting tips in there, as well. We'll kind of move on beyond the opportunity, energy costs because that's not it, we still have monetary costs, and so, if I were to ask you today how much your life costs, would you be able to tell me that? It's an important question and it's an important number. To me, honestly, it's probably one of the most important numbers and I get people coming to me all the time, and say, hey, I wanna improve my credit score, so, and so, and so, and they know their credit score but they don't know how much their life costs them. So, I want you to think about everything that you are responsible for, month to month that is essential and I want you to write it down. So, this could take a little longer but that includes your rent, that includes any healthcare costs, any transportation costs, any insurance. If you're responsible for your cell phone bill. I would say, let's leave out any credit card payments or any debt and let's leave it just at what your life costs you right now with like your basics and your essential items. Like, paying off debt is essential. Don't get me wrong but I wanna know your basic under head, what does that equal to? So, you might need a calculator for this one, as well, and those of you at home, you need to do this too, and you have a little bit more flexibility because we can't see you, so I definitely want you to make sure that you enter your figure of how much your life costs, including your rent or your mortgage, your car payments, your transportation costs, your insurance, and everything else that you need to sustain yourself on a month to month basis. And I often ask people to do this because, sometimes, when people do this, they realize one of two things. That their life is actually more affordable than they realized that it is or their life is not as affordable as they thought it was. Or some people are like, you know, I'm right in alignment with what I thought my life cost but I want you to think about this because this number should guide your other financial decisions. Sometimes, whether it's, you know, deciding to start a family or add on to your family. Whether it's deciding to leave your job or relocate, or to quit your, whatever it may be. This number is important because you need to know your baseline and what you need to replace or reduce in order to be able to sustain yourself on a month to month basis. If you have any questions about what should go into that number, feel free to ask me. So, I have people tallying their life costs and that's their mortgage, any financial responsibilities they're responsible for other than debt payments. Do we have any numbers in the chat? Yeah, we've got someone brave coming forward to volunteer some of their numbers. So, in terms of rent, they've got two thousand three hundred. You don't have to break out your rent, you could just add it all together. Oh, okay. Yes. And then, it also goes onto living expenses. That relies on my math skills which can't be too reliable. It comes up at about, around about four thousand dollars. Give or take. Per month, just as a baseline. Okay, for that person who was at four thousand. Did it surprise you that your life costs that much? When you added it up? What about in here, what did we get? Mine was 21 hundred. Did it surprise you? No, my guess, when you asked the question was two thousand. So almost right on par. That's good, where do you live? Dallas. Okay. (laughing) That's like California rent. (audience laughing) Which is great, you know, you have to think about there's that opportunity cost that we talked about. There's always an opportunity cost for everything. In California, we have great weather, you know. It's a wonderful place to live but you're gonna pay to live here and, you know, do you wanna live somewhere where it's a little more affordable? You can afford to go on vacation every now and again? Or do you wanna live somewhere where you feel like you're living in a vacation? You know, most days out of the year. So, it definitely does depend. Does anyone else wanna share at or about what their number, or you don't have to share your exact number but did it surprise you? Was anyone surprised by their number? For better or for worse? Mine was like five thousand. Okay. Now, was that in alignment or was that, were you kind of like oh, I spent a lot of money, or were you like, oh, that's not bad. Well, I've done this activity like several different times, I just haven't done it recently, and I know when I was planning on what my lifestyle should be was in that space and now that business is growing within that, I'm like, yeah, that's still probably about the same number. That's still comfortable, okay. That's good. Okay, did anybody say they were surprised online? No surprises but we've got some numbers coming in. So, a few more around four thousand, as well. Five thousand six hundred. And some Dallas support, coming in. (laughing) I can just see it coming in as I'm reading through. So, yeah. But let us know if that surprised you. Yeah because it's important to assess your costs on a regular basis because, I mean, we're talking about money mindset but by assessing your costs, you'll see where your mindset has gotten you, so far. So, you can see whether your mindset has, you know, kind of got you to a place where you're overextending yourself financially or if you kind of have a mindset that allows you to play it safer, or play within your means, and neither one, you know, of course overextending yourself financially is not ideal but the important thing is that you're learning now that, okay, my mindset is contributing to these behaviors that force me to let my things, essentially, own me. I'm not as free and flexible as I thought I was because of this lifestyle that I've taken on. So, most of the time, people spend money. We think of money and our spending habits kinda like, I walk into the store, I decide I want it, I bought it. Or I decided I needed it and I bought it.