Investing In Happiness

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Sometimes it makes sense to invest in your happiness and relationships at the expense of your long term financial success. Me and my wife Kelly talk about how we have approached investing in happiness in our lives.

Resources Related To This Episode

All In The Van

Transcription:

Sometimes when it comes to finances, it can be really easy to focus on your investments and focus on property because it all has a figure and you can see your net worth grow, but it can be a lot more difficult to spend money on your relationship and to value that relationship because it doesn’t actually have any figures attached to it. So we wanted to create an episode today to talk about how we’ve kind of approached investing in our relationship in the hopes that it’ll help some people out there. So. Hey, my name is Ryan today. I have with me Kelly. Hi. Can we have, you don’t know is my wife. We’ve been married almost 10 years. Can you believe we’ve got three kids as well? Yeah. And we’ve got a pretty good marriage. We’re pretty happy. Pretty good, pretty happy. We still enjoy each other’s company so that’s good. And we still laugh a lot. Um, but yeah, this idea kind of came about and then we were talking in the car about it and you came up with this idea that will you explain it to them?

Well, what we were talking about how people put value on specific things in their lives and that I think a lot of the time your relationship kind of gets forgotten because it’s not like natural for you to put like a monetary value in your relationship. Like we were talking about. We, we’re talking with friends about how we haven’t actually like invest in necessarily yet because for us we chose to invest into our marriage and our kids instead of that.

And I always felt like I’ve always had this thing. I don’t know since before we even met that I was like, okay, if I get married one day, no matter how much success I have in my marriage falls apart, then no success is worth that. And so I don’t know if that came about through watching my parents marriage or like what it was, but I just always felt like yeah, because you’re the family unit and being happily married is more important to me than financial success. And so we’ve always kind of made decisions based off that. But I feel like a lot of people don’t because like you were saying, it’s so easy and exciting to track your finances when you’re saving towards a house or when you’re investing in property. You can get your property revalued, you can see how much it’s worth. My net worth is x amount. I’ve got a million dollars in equity or whatever. You can’t say

that you can’t track the health of your relationships. Can you like there’s no way to be like, yeah, you’ve done so good this week.

Our relationship is currently with $200,000 in. Previously it was only worth $100,000. You can’t do that. And so. Well I guess why don’t we talk about some of the decisions that we’ve made that have been bad loan term financial decisions. Like if you just look at it from like a financial standpoint, we could have that into property or into something else. But we chose to instead invest into our relationship.

Well is it. I think it’s not, it’s not just about our relationship, it’s like investing into happiness. Okay. So for us, like our relationship is a big part of that happiness. So for us like we can easily kind of just say that, but I think the overarching umbrella that it kinda comes under is like your emotional happiness and wellbeing.

There will be single people listening to this as well.

But like I think really what it’s about and it’s that happiness and contentment in life. So the earliest I can remember is when you quit your job. Yes. Yeah. That was the people that.

Okay. So I was working as a pharmaceutical rep earning good money, six figures as well as commissions as well. And so we had earned enough commissions that we had paid off a large chunk of our debt. We paid off our debt completely

because you have debt when you just live emotionally, just

when you get married young. And she’s not to work for some reason, the bank gave me this big credit card, a loan for a car and then all of a sudden you’re in heaps of debt. So we had paid off our debt. We were saving towards a house and I think we’re one or maybe two commissions away from a house deposit quarter, like three months and we would have had a house deposit earning enough money to borrow from the banks as well. So we definitely could have bought a house and we would have been. And then we chose to give all that up. We quit and moved up to the Gold Coast and I it.

Why did, why did you quit? So you quit because the job was like creatively stifling. Yeah. And as well, like it was emotionally, like really emotionally stretching for you and not in like a positive way and that’s why like that’s why we were like okay, we’ll just quit.

Well, and the thing is we weren’t happy so on the central coast and all of the friends that we had there, a lot of them had moved from Sydney, which was the same as us and they were all really happy and they’ll all like, we love the central coast, we’re going to raise our kids here forever. We’re like, man, we just didn’t feel settled there. So I think we didn’t feel happy we could have bought a house there and pursued that, but we weren’t happy. So we’re like, I had always wanted to live in Queensland. You didn’t want to move that far away from family. But then we had been on holidays up there and you’re like, okay, I’m ready to move. I’m like, okay, well let’s give this a go.

And then everyone’s like, darian move to Queensland unless you have a job. So we thought, quit your job,

don’t worry about it. You’re like, I want you to get a job before we started interviewing for jobs and stuff like that. But yeah. And then we decided to quit. I’ll start my own business and we had, we use deposit to survive while my business got off the ground. We use it to move, to move and then survive after that. So that was the first one. Another big one was the van. Yes, definitely the van that we thought would close in around $12,000. Yeah, like a shale beds. So that was like a similar situation. Right. We’re on the gold coast. We’d been there a few years, we weren’t completely happy. What else was really happy and we, we were at the point, a common theme that keeps happening. What other point again, where our finances wanting to control my businesses now I’m making good money and that we’re at the point where and were like wow, like this ability, that other point where we could use, well we were saving and that savings could have been for a deposit to buy a house on the gold coast or to buy an investment. Instead we decided to use that money to buy a van, renovated van and go traveling because we weren’t happy

but we weren’t happy living that style of life. So I think I like, it was probably the same like when we moved from the central coast, it was like the style of life of living in the suburbs and like those particular suburbs and that pace of life will be like not just doesn’t suit us. And then again on the gold coast line, that pace of life, that style of suburbs, again, like not, didn’t just didn’t make us happy.

And then there’s something like the bigger decisions, but there’s also a smaller decisions as well. I personally find it hard to buy flowers because the monetary costs of flowers like don’t like this sounds dumb. Yeah, that sounds dumb. But because they die because they die and there’s no, you don’t eat. That’s what they serve. No physical previs. Sure. Just more short lived. Whereas like if you invest into like a couch and you’re buying a couch that you’re gonna live on for a long period of time and the kids enjoy versus flowers but the flowers, but then it means a lot to you. And so I buy flowers because it means a lot to you even though I think it’s dumb, it’s just different for me. Yes. Yeah. It’s making those decisions that are like, we’re not saving towards something you choosing to spend money that will, will, will, that,

that’s, that’s a big. Like that’s a big thing though, isn’t it? It’s like I don’t see a physical purpose to this, but I feel like it’s the right thing. And so I’m going to go with that

one. Well, the thing is when I buy flowers for you, you feel like I love you. Yeah, you makes you happy and it makes our overarching relationship better and then it makes us better parents because we’re more in love with each other. So it’s an. It’s an act of love for me to you, but it’s just can be hard to do because of financial reasons because of the way my brain works, but that’s like a little example and other ones are like going out. Like we went out for lunch yesterday so we should have gone to work and we probably shouldn’t have spent that much on lunch but it was this place that had an awesome vibe and awesome food and because the kids have been sick and then other stuff that’s happened, we haven’t been on a date in a couple of weeks and so it was like, well this is going to be really important to invest into us.

So do you think that maybe by. Because now that we live up here are like life style and our pace of life is a lot slower. I feel like we’re a lot more attuned to kind of sense where I like happiness is at and we can kind of gauge, okay, where we have been stressed, the kids have been sick, whatever, so now the day to invest in the relationship instead of investing in what works, like on paper, say like, do you think that maybe that’s a key thing that people need to look for is to slow down their life and so that they can tune into themselves and be able to gauge where their happiness is at maybe. Yeah.

Oh, that’s a pretty big ask to say to people just slow down your life like 70

nobody. It’s nobody. It’s mindfulness. It’s not necessarily physically slowing down your pace of life. It’s just stopping even just for a few minutes to just think about how do I feel today and what am I doing that’s like building towards my health and wellbeing, not just my wealth

because we do have some times where our relationship is really good and we’re both feeling really good. We’re really happy and it’s like, Okay Ryan, you go work extra long today because we want to work towards our wealth today. We feel fine, we feel really happy. You feel really good taking care of the kids, doing all the bedtime by yourself and stuff like that. And so I guess we do ebb and flow with it. So I think the concept that we’re trying to get across is just that mindfulness, having that mindfulness around your own happiness as well as the health of your relationships and putting a value on that. Even though you can’t.

Well it’s just, it’s not a monetary value, but it’s. It’d be the same as working with time, like in resources I guess, isn’t it? Yeah. Time and resource and making sure that you’re allocating those things because that’s so important.

Yeah. Well and that’s really important to us and it might not be important to everyone else out there. Like for us, relationships are important. I talked about how for me, if we had all the wealth success possible, but our relationship split up, which we’ve seen happen to a lot of people eat. You guys probably know people who pursue their career in expense of their relationship and then the relationship doesn’t work out for us. That was not something that we wanted to do. We really value our relationship and so yeah, I think just had that mindfulness around where you’re at and then choose to invest into that for your long term happiness and success and like divorce is expensive.

Really. It’s kind of an investment really been invested in for you. What it is, well to think about that you can have emotional goals as well like investing into those areas of your life, but with a purpose, thinking about where do I want my relationship to because we’ve often done that, like when things have gotten a bit rocky or hard gone, okay, where do we want to be and what steps do we take to get there and I think you can definitely do that in other areas of your life. Life in happiness areas. How happy do I want to be? Don’t want to enjoy my life. Am I happy when I wake up in the morning or am I not like, what can I do to get to where I want to be? Yeah,

because if you’re like most people only set financial goals or career goals or productivity goals, they’re really easy to set because it’s so tangible. You can totally tell when you’ve achieved them, but with emotional goals or relationship goals, that’s a lot harder to set their invisible god, the invisible God. It’s. But I think you’re totally right. They’re worth having how happy do we want to be and what steps is it going to take to get to that happiness and then those goals might conflict with your financial goals and then you need to find the middle ground. That’s right. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, so we hope this has been helpful today. We really value our relationship and love investing into it and we have made many decisions over the years. We talked about a couple that were made, but we’ve made so many and we’re even making them right now, investing into ourselves as we’re hitting our thirties feeling like different people you know, we’re investing into the new people that we’re becoming now as well, and so this is something that we’re constantly doing and something that we see a lot of value in and so we hope that we can, I guess for you today to think about that in your own life and make a conscious decision yourself about whether you want to invest into your relationships, how much you want to invest into it.

Don’t just focus on finances, but focus on your relationship as well. Is that it? Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

Until next time you whisper red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather.

Wait, are we going to look at the camera or we can both look at the same place. Where do you normally that’s really happening. So the same. My eyes when I’m looking at this, do it again.