Investing in living

I am currently changing my approach to spending money, in the most obvious, (in hindsight) way.

First I did an audit of how I spend my time, then I looked at how much I could improve my level of enjoyment or productivity by investing money in support of each activity.  I also looked for new activities that I could add to my life if I spent some money.

I ended up with a fairly simple list in order of Return On Investment.   Without going into all of the details here are a few of the outcomes:

– I have sold a whole load of old gadgets on eBay, because I only used them for a couple of hours a month

– I reaffirmed my decision not to spend any money on cars for a long time,  my current car get used for about an hour a week, although my wife uses her’s more, so we won’t be investing in a second car when hers gives up in a few years time.

– I invested in some great walking gear and swimming gear because that’s an activity I do every day and I want to maximise my enjoyment and minimise the opportunity for excuses

– I cancelled a load of magazine subscriptions, because I can read the same stuff on my Tablet

– I felt happy at all the personal money I invested in my work computing environment, because I use it for 4-6 hours a day and this provides by far the greatest ROI.

– I am considering upgrading my TC1000 to a TC1100 off eBay because I use it for about 1.5 hours a day which aside from TV is probably my second most important activity, that can be improved.  (now that I have GPRS)

– Next years bonus is going on upgrading the TV, because we spend about 2 hours a day watching TV

– Debbie and I go out a lot more on our own, because time alone is very precious when you have 4 kids!

– We give more to charity because the return on charity investment is hundreds of times greater than the ROI we get investing in ourselves!