The blank canvas garden and your spending career

Written 8th December 2024

Liken your financial future once you get a job, to buying a brand new built house that has a garden with just a lawn and empty flower beds.

The canvas is blank. How you decide to spend the money that you will earn throughout your working life is your choice. Just like how you choose to plant up your new flower beds. Think about the time you plan to have it (a job or that flower garden) and what you want it to look like. Flourishing and healthy? Mature and stable? Will you buy too many plants for the space? The stronger ones taking all the nutrients from the soil and shading the smaller plants? Do you change your garden with the fashions and don't need to worry about caring for them? If they die, you'll just replace them?

Or will you remember that you have time. The rest of your life. For plants to mature and flourish? Fill all the spaces up in your garden with their beautiful scent and voluptuous colours?

Or do you only think short term? I need to make the garden look mature this week. Spend a fortune on plants and bark mulch. But don't bother reading how to care for each plant, what soil or shade it needs? How often to feed it? What about the time to prune, deadhead and weed?  Your quick fix didn't work because you weren't expecting to have to actually look after the plants? Nurture and tend. It will never look like a wonderfully manicured, mature, healthy garden. It'll look a bit sad and neglected.  Dull leaves, overgrown with weeds, few flowers. Bit rubbish really.

This is exactly the same with your financial future. You need to be interested in it. Even on a basic level. You need to invest time into tending to it, keeping an eye on it. Think of the next 30 / 40 / 50 / 60 years of your life. The small changes you can make and ways of thinking towards your spending habits. Not just spending, your using habits. Whatever they may be. 

If you're always living payday to payday, never have any savings, still unable to afford a deposit for your own place, is there something you are doing wrong putting you in this position?  Don't look at other people who do have a nice standard of living with envy since everyone has to make choices about their spending and saving and most people work hard for what they have. They had a plan. Even if they didn't realise they did. Even if they only started being able to manage without an overdraft. That was a step in the right direction. Then to have a small savings pot. It's a lifetime of spending choices. 

Time moves on, there is nothing we can do to stop that, but we do have the option to get a better job. Or a second job. Or move to a smaller house or different area. Or to stop spending so much.

You need to tend to your garden. Little by little. See the long term vision of the beauty of your garden / pension / house etc, and do what you need to do to make it happen.  It won't grow strong and tall if you don't feed and water it at least. Your finances won't be healthy if you don't know how to stop spending every penny you earn.  Stop paying attention to the advertising.  Stop trying to keep up with the Jones.  Start checking you got paid all the overtime you earned. Start checking price comparison sites. Start looking for better interest paying bank accounts. Start making your own packed lunch and drinks.  Stop mindlessly driving everywhere. Cut back on spending on stuff that long term you really don't need and watch how your financial garden will grow as you do.