About Me

Blog

Work Experience

Project Portfolio

Contact

Return to Homepage

In the context of saving money, the focus is so often placed on reducing expenses, likely because it has immediate results, but there's only so many things that can be cut before trimming the fat turns into trimming the muscle. I posit it's more valuable to increase the income to improve that ratio, rather than cutting the expenses. Using higher quality "ingredients" in life (whether it actually is with food, but also for housing, transport, tools, etc) has cascading effects that can lead to higher quality outputs, snowballing upwards rather than downwards.

That's not to say that it's a bad thing to cut back on expenses, but rather to make sure that the things being bought are worthwhile to spend money on and can be traced back to improving life, and not in a "treat-yo-self" kind of way, but in a more substantial and meaningful way (buying fruit instead of cookies, even though the cookies are tastier, the fruit will lead to a better future).

This is something that I'm in the middle of realizing now too. In parts of my life I've found it to be a marked improvement when I use the right tools for the job and have the right materials (when I flipped the house a while back, my mantra was "do it right, do it once"), but in other parts I haven't made that connection yet. For instance, in less concrete (or more complex) systems like socializing or generating art, where there really is no "right" answer or best course of action, I struggle to build the confidence to handle the multitude of situations that could occur, so in that case I "reduce my expense" by reducing social interactions, when the right answer would be to "increase my income" by increasing my social interactions.

So the point being: in my opinion, it makes more sense to Build Up parts of life by doing more, rather than Breaking Down by doing less, since the lowest you can really go is 0, but the highest you can go is infinite (and realistically, as you go up more, you can place safety nets that prevent you from hitting 0 altogether).