Being a smart renter is also about looking after your health and wealth in ways that are beneficial to you and to those you care about. In Health and wealth, we’ll look at some resources that could make great improvements to your physical and financial health.
We are not scholars in this subject but from our reading, experience and talking to others, there seems to be some common ideas around what real wealth is and ways on how to get there:
- Knowing what enough is and knowing when you have enough. If you don’t know what enough is, you’ll never have enough.
- Having enough to satisfy your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs. Neglect one or more of these areas, and no amount of excess in another area can make up for it.
- Wealth is roughly half underpinned by good luck and half underpinned by good management [1].
- The greatest influence on a person’s quality of life, rich or poor, is the quality of relationships they have. Invest time in developing good relationships [2].
With this in mind, we would like to introduce you to some ideas that we have used to triple our savings whilst feeling an increase in life quality. These ideas complement the other ideas for living large on less that are on Smart Renting.
We recommend a lot of books in health and wealth because they cover so much more ground than we can. We paid for them ourselves and don’t receive anything for recommending them; we are recommending them because they have paid for themselves many times over.
- Nothing comes for free but you don’t need to spend a fortune on financial advice either. In this article, we outline some resources that you can use to give your finances an overhaul and potentially cut your spending by 25%.
- Cost: $40 to $100, potential savings $10,000 or more a year
- You might wonder what you’d do if you didn’t have to work so much to pay the bills. Here we explore some ways to redefine your relationship with paid employment.
- Cost: $40, potential savings: hours or days of your time per week
- Tobacco, alcohol and sugar can be a big drain on your health and wealth whilst giving nothing in return. Quitting any of these will improve your life quality and is actually quite easy with the right resources.
- Cost: $20 to $60, potential savings: $6000 or more a year
Insource what you can (unemployment insurance)
- No one can fire you from the jobs that you do yourself. Learning to meet more of your needs is a great way to gain skills and provide a buffer against economic shocks.
- Cost and potential savings will vary depending on your skills and household needs.
- The best gym is the one that you carry with you all the time: your body. Here we explore ways to easily integrate exercise into your daily life.
- Cost: $20, potential savings: $1500 a year
- When should you consider paying for insurance? Whilst the issue is not always black and white, insurance may be unnecessary if you can cover the fallout yourself.
- Cost: free, potential savings: $3000 to $4000 a year
- If you are looking to buy a home in the future, being a smart renter means you are more likely to do your homework and buy a home that is enough. Remember, only fools rush in.
- Cost: free, potential savings: Up to hundreds of thousands of dollars
Although the savings here may overlap, a little time and money spent can yield big improvements in your health and wealth, which along with good relationships are an important bedrock in having a good life.
Further Reading:
[1] This means that where you are born and the family you are born into will have a major influence on the wealth you will have:
[2] This has been confirmed by the world’s most comprehensive longitudinal study: