The Health / Wealth Balance

How Investing in your health will also lead to more wealth

February 1, 2018February 1, 2018 ~ Inge Natalie Hol ~ 1 Comment

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!

Day 31 / 31 Set Goals and Visualize your Dreams

Day 31: Set Goals and Visualize your Dreams

October 31, 2017October 8, 2017 ~ Inge Natalie Hol ~ Leave a comment

Congratulations!! You’ve made it to the last day of the 31 Day Challenge to Financial Excellence! Some days might have been easier and others more difficult, but you held on and continued until the end. That’s a good sign as it not only means that you’ve probably made some huge progress in many of your financial areas, it also indicates that you are much more likely to appreciate the progress you’ve made and to keep up giving financial planning a prominent place in your life.

And that is also the very last challenge of this series: to set goals and to visualize your dreams in order to keep moving forward even now you’ve come to an end of the 31 Days. Continue reading “Day 31 / 31 Set Goals and Visualize your Dreams” →

Day 28 / 31 Celebrate your Victories

October 28, 2017October 5, 2017 ~ Inge Natalie Hol ~ Leave a comment

During the past few weeks and in the next weeks, months and indeed years, you hopefully will have and will continue to set new financial goals. Setting goals is one thing, but achieving them is a whole different matter. Goals are usually easy to set and difficult to achieve and require real commitment and dedication. As you continue on your journey to financial excellence, your goals might become bigger and more abstract which in turn makes it more difficult to see your daily efforts paying off.

You can make goals more tangible by not focussing on the end goal but on smaller milestones along the way, making it easier to see progress.. Then – and here is the most important part – you should celebrate your victories. Once you have got together half, a quarter or even just 10% of your $10,000 savings goal – celebrate. Continue reading “Day 28 / 31 Celebrate your Victories” →

Day 18 / 31 Track your Progress

October 18, 2017September 27, 2017 ~ Inge Natalie Hol ~ Leave a comment

One of the most fun parts of setting goals is seeing yourself getting closer to them with each step that you take. By tracking your progress, achieving financial excellence is not just a great end goal in itself, it will also become a fun journey with many smaller milestones to work towards to and keep track of along the way.

You can track your progress for many different financial aspects, such as your net worth, your savings, the debt you are paying off, your emergency fund or your pensions. The options are endless. Continue reading “Day 18 / 31 Track your Progress” →

Step 95: Visualize your Dreams

July 10, 2017March 19, 2017 ~ Inge Natalie Hol ~ Leave a comment

Step 95 of the 100 Steps Mission to Financial Independence: Visualize your Dreams — Step 95: Visualize your Dreams

Today we’ll step away from the numbers and figures and logical planning for a moment and instead focus on a fun step towards financial independence: visualizing your dreams. This step is the ultimate step to all of the following:

keeping up your motivation
setting goals
not forgetting to live in the “now”

We’ve discussed the first two points in detail in several of the previous steps, but the third one we haven’t yet looked at so much. Let’s discuss the importance of that third point through an example: imagine a couple who gets really inspired to become financially independent. They make a budget, cut expenses, start a side hustle to earn some more money to invest and they see their efforts paying off as their bank account increases. So they hustle a little more, cut another few expenses and speed up the process. But with time they become so absorbed by this process that other things are being cut too. Even though they have a fair amount of money, family holidays are “too expensive”, clothes are recycled well past their “best before” date (which makes the children an easy target to laugh at at school) and any real family time is disappearing quickly as the side hustle takes up any valuable time the family might have had together. After many years of dedication and hard work their bank account finally reaches that milestone of $1,000,000 that they had set themselves. The couple gets ready to celebrate this moment and loosen the reins a little – not wanting to retire completely but at least to work less – only to find that their children have gone off to college, friends from the past are have ceased to be friends as they have hardly seen each other in recent years as the couple had either no time or no money to attend get-togethers. They are not longer members of their sport clubs and realize they don’t know that many people anymore. There are no photo albums on the shelves with photos of happy family holidays, no memories of fun days down at the beach or up in the mountains at the weekends and they can’t really remember having taken the children on any visits to the theatre, a museum or even the cinema. The couple never had time for fun activities and only ever thought of making money and then some more.

And what for? What is the point of having $1,000,000 in your bank account if you can’t enjoy it? What is the value of money if not to use it and enjoy the little things in life? Spending time with the people we love? More than those $1,000,000 isn’t it important to have time to do what you want to do and to make a difference in the world? Continue reading “Step 95: Visualize your Dreams” →