If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times, that expression “money makes the world go around” is something that we all believe at some point. But we’re all facing some form of financial challenge. Struggling with any financial constraints is difficult and while we can be so incredibly desperate to earn more money or have more things there are some valuable life lessons we can all learn when experiencing these tough moments.
Resourcefulness
This is one of the biggest skills that we learn when we have to make the most of what we have. We have to be more creative when it comes to finding solutions to those everyday problems. When we have money these problems don’t present themselves because we can easily pay them off. Take something like your hair.
You might think that you don’t like the idea of growing your hair long because it doesn’t suit you but so many men during the pandemic had to grow their hair and in fact embraced their long luxurious locks. This How To Grow Long Hair For Men: The Complete Expert Guide can provide a few little insights if you cannot afford to get your haircut all of the time. But this is just one physical benefit of being resourceful. Making the most of what we have stimulates a lot of creativity. Learning how to make things go further can actually help us to understand that, in fact, we didn’t necessarily need more money, we just needed to know how to make the most of our current circumstances better.
Appreciating the Simple Things
This is something that again many of us had to learn during the pandemic. With limited resources and no chance in hell of getting on a plane, we have to find some sense of joy in the small things. If you are experiencing financial constraints you’ve got to recognise what joint contentment in the small things actually brings.
We can look to older generations and see how they made the most of their time. Of course, they didn’t have phones and nowhere near as much choice when it comes to TV! Something like YouTube is free and we are incredibly lucky to have this in our lives but we can easily find ourselves over-saturated with stuff. Instead, switch everything off and recognise the simple pleasures of spending time with the people you care about or pursuing hobbies. If there’s one thing about the modern world that is fleeting it’s free time. We think we need to fill our days with scanning social media or doing things that don’t benefit us.
We have to for the sake of our mental health appreciate the smaller things and when we finally overcome the twitchiness we experience because we’re going without social media or we feel that we need to do something a bit more stimulating those simple pleasures become completely nourishing. This is why so many of us can benefit from learning a tool like meditation. It becomes an amazing way for us to understand that life has nothing to do with all that stuff we fill into our existence.
The Lesson of Humility
Being in a financial hole is a very humbling lesson. Many of us stick our heads in the sand and think that it’s far better to put money on a credit card but this credit card debt soon accumulates because we don’t understand how to get out of debt. Any real financial difficulty forces us to understand that material possessions aren’t everything. Everybody feels some sort of temptation to keep up with the Joneses in one way or another.
You could be frustrated that your neighbours go on holiday three or four times a year and you haven’t been for a number of years, but you can’t see behind the curtain. Financial difficulties remind us that we can’t determine our worth purely on material possessions or plane tickets. There is much more to life than actually getting away. We all benefit from getting away but we don’t need to have the hassle of going to an airport waiting for hours for our bags to turn up and then going to a hotel where there’s no running water.
When we have limited money we start to recognise that there are parts of our lives that have not served a true purpose but have merely been window dressing for what we perceive to be a worthy existence.
The Skills of Delayed Gratification and Frugality
Delayed gratification when we think long and hard about a purchase before we make it gives us an understanding of the sacrifices we can make today to benefit us in the long run. The big problem most of us have is that we want stuff now and therefore it’s easy enough to put items in a basket on Amazon and have them delivered to us the next day. When we buy something we have to determine if it is actually worth it.
When we don’t have much money we have to think long and hard about how this item can fit into our lives and actually benefit us. You might think about the latest exercise equipment that you think will definitely put you into shape this time but soon enough it may gather dust alongside all of your other items of equipment. Delayed gratification is a great way to be patient.
Likewise, being frugal becomes a way of life where we learn to save money through new habits. Finding cost-effective alternatives is an essential part of life for so many people because they don’t have much. But if you can find ways to save money on your favourite brand of coffee and stick to this habit, it becomes very difficult to undo this habit. This means that when you are able to get your pay rise or you come into money, you will still have these habits firmly ingrained. This means that you can actually use your newfound wealth for proper reasons. You don’t need to just buy the latest car or add an extension to your house for the sake of it because you have truly learned how to go without.
From the fact that you can be stylish while saving a lot of money to the real-life lessons, going without money is something that is very tough but, in fact, it can be the making of us.