To Be Happy in Your Money Journey, Stop Doing These 3 Things

The agony of hyperbolic discounting

I have nothing in mind but to accumulate wealth when introduced to the world of personal finance.

And I am fascinated with all the success stories I read back then during my earlier years in the corporate organization..

One day I told myself that I would be a feature as one of the Top 40 millionaires under 40 men in a magazine who will make it soon in a particular industry.

Time flies so fast to the point that I am less than ten months away from what they call the “life begins” age. I am no way close to that dream of becoming part of the big league as I have imagined back in almost two decades.

But I have learned to build wealth gradually without sacrificing my happiness every single day. What I realize about life and money is we are very much accustomed to the reward of today.

I recently shared about a job role that I declined recently.

It was a Finance Director role offered to me a few months ago. And it was an 18% uplift from my current salary.

And what is more enticing is they were luring me with a USD 16,800 compensation bonus in my second year. This offer was something big if you were living here in a third-world country like the Philippines.

Upon hearing this, I was initially counting the money not yet received inside my head. It was indeed hard to resist.

From that experience, I have placed the same realization about my finance journey.

It may sound odd a little bit — but here is what I realized in my job offer story.

1. Stop collecting rewards when it is not yet due.

From my job offer story, I love how the Finance Director sounds from the outside.

If it were four years ago, I could not have waited to update my LinkedIn profile.

The money and job title are enticing — and it was enough for me to use it as a down payment for another real estate property.

One of the reasons why I declined is it entailed greater responsibilities. It would show a sexy title on LinkedIn — but it would take away my joy, as this would eat up my time in reality.

I had the dream of madly collecting real estate properties when I vouched on my success story on leveraging on good debt and using other people’s money.

This aggressive dream eventually changed when I had a lot of odd experiences about the pandemic.

I also came across a conversation with my wife.

She told me that a friend of ours is feeling pressure at this moment. They need to make a bank loan take-out very soon that would cost them to pay USD 800 every monthly period.

They cannot vouch for other people’s money.

Rent rates have dropped like crazy — and the sad thing about it is the construction of the unit got delayed.

They have no idea of the completion date.

So they have no clear forecast on when they can have it rented.

You love the idea of saying how huge is your asset portfolio — but you discount the pressure that you might be experiencing later in the future.

2. Stop overlooking your future condition.

Let us go back to my previous aspiration of collecting real estate properties,

I do not want to end up being overaggressive by getting rich quickly.

And experience the worst when that future date of that obligation nearly becomes outstanding.

Just like what happened to our friend

It is stressful to experience such things when you are old already. Provided that you have slowed down from doing agile work, you must be mindful also when you are nearing retirement age.

And when I reach 60 — and another economic blur happens, I do not want to intensively work on my cash flow, again and again, to get through with my money problems.

Do not ignore the effort and time element involved in the generation of wealth.

Look at things from an end-to-end perspective.

What is the point of stressing yourself about money when you get to that age of downsloping?

You must be appreciating life more and enjoying every sip of your coffee.

3. Stop counting short-lived money.

My wife and I are both accountants.

We love real estate. Apart from managing our rental property, we also have a list of clientele who entrusted us with their property.

Our tenant recently breached the terms of the contract. And they left our unit due to the cost-cutting measures embraced by the many.

Blame it to Covid.

So we advertised it again to our usual online channels and reconnected with our list of business partners in the community. The unit was rented out at USD 1,000 monthly initially — and the going rate is only at USD 660.

There were so many supplies of units in our condominium building. And the competition of having the space rented is very rigid.

We had a viewer who wanted to get it with the condition to change the bed. My wife and I decided to be firm with our agreement.

As-is and where-is basis

And whatever the special request of the tenant is, we say no to their appeal immediately.

The thing we had in mind is that rental cost was already cheap and making more cash outlay at this time is just abusive. And guess what happened after a few days, the potential tenants walked away.

It is now buyers market nowadays — and the thing is they know it.

So we learned our lesson the hard way.

And it is a good thing we were able to close it after a few weeks with an additional cost outlay of USD 200 for a study table, which we additionally purchased.

When making decisions, make sure that your mind is not cluttered.

Let go of the pride and think of the opportunity cost.

Forgone opportunities occur because you are emotionally focusing on your right as a person or business owner.

Final thoughts

It is normal to indulge yourself with victories to keep you motivated.

But once you get used to overcommitting, it might soon bring you distress.

Your brain might be telling you to — just go for it because things look good on paper.

And then you realize the feeling of being overwhelmed later once you draw closer to the due date.

The lesson learned here is to be mindful of what investments you are getting yourself into now and visualize how your life would look like when you still have it with you in the future.