The Health / Wealth Balance

Yesterday, on the last day of January (where did that first month of the year go??), I came across two interesting articles focussing on the link between health and wealth. I’m always super motivated to improve my health and in fact one of the main reasons to aspire FI is so I can hopefully enjoy more free time when still in great health.

Anyway, back to yesterday. What made these articles so interesting was that both focus on the importance of investing in your health and the compounding effects this can have long term on both your health as well as your wealth.

The first article: 30 Times and Then You’re Dead. Unless… How to Get Rich With Exercise, by FIIntrovert shows exactly how important it is to invest in your health if you are in fact  pursuing FI. If you are weary of spending too much money on your health, then I greatly recommend this article. FIIntrovert has made several calculations on how spending money on your health will over the long term not only benefit your health but also your finances. It’s really worth a read if you are needing a little extra motivation to look after your own well-being!

The second blog post was the announcement by Smart FI to join his February Plank Challenge: The idea being that you do a plank every day, starting with a minute and slowly increasing the amount of time each day. In his words: “The underlying theme of the challenge is that small incremental improvements over a month or a year lead to big changes.” I love how this of course applies to both your finances as well as your workouts. His post was also a call to other FI bloggers to join his challenge, so I decided to join too.

So here I am at the start of February with 28 days to do a plank a day ahead…! I’m very excited, as I have been wanting to focus on my health more anyway, so this will hopefully keep me motivated. As I write this post I have just done my first plank – unfortunately a minute was a bit too long for me, it ended up being 30 seconds… I hope to be able to increase this by a few seconds each day to 3 minutes at the end of February. I’ll keep you posted.

And if you are still interested in joining this challenge too, make sure to hop over to Smart FI’s post and let him know you are joining, as he’s got a blog roll / accountability listwith everybody participating.

Here’s to a good start of February and some new fresh goals to work towards!