How Yoga Can Help Your Finances
The blogger Young And Thrifty recently posted on the similarities between personal finance and yoga. As someone who’s pretty into the whole Downward Dog movement, I can party with that idea.
Here’s what you can learn about personal finance from getting a bit of Cobra action on.
Discipline
The only way to get practiced and perfect in your Tree Action is to get into a routine, and that takes a fair amount of discipline. A bit of yoga every morning, classes once or twice a week, and you’ll start to fit yoga into your everyday life. It’s exactly the same with savings. If you can get into a routine, you’ll find it easy to fit your life around savings.
Setting aside a bit of money every week without fail will get you into a sustainable routine, which you can gradually increase upon. With interest and regular savings, you’ll have yourself a reasonable slush fund in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Practice and Humility
Practice often makes perfect, except in the instances when you’re actually practicing the wrong way. For instance, if you’ve been tackling the whole yoga thing for a couple of years, and then someone corrects a small aspect of your stance, you’ll feel the difference instantly. The same goes with saving. Learning from your mistakes and not continuing on with ideas that are unsuited to you will improve your whole personal finance existence.
Can’t maintain a savings scheme at 10% of your income? Drop it down to a level you are comfortable with until things ease up a bit. Feel like your investing is taking away from your ability to set up your retirement fund? Talk to a personal finance advisor about how to restructure your finances.
Making little changes to tailor your personal finances will end in significant dividends and a much easier time of it the meantime.
Individual
Not everything is about the individual. Yoga is. It’s about you getting the most out of a pose or a class, about improving from week to week, and finding the yoga style that you enjoy the most. Personal finance is a bit similar. It’s about finding the finance solutions that suit you and your lifestyle, as opposed to your next-door neighbours, friends, families or colleagues.
You can take advice from the people around you, and experts, but in the end you need to set up savings in a way that is comfortable and beneficial for you. If you really hate the idea of investing, look at property or savings funds. If you want higher returns and a bit more of a risk, then go for it. In the end, it’s an individual (or family) decision to make
Time Is A Healer
If you have a sustainable savings schedule- or a regular yoga routine- time and routine will do the rest. On top of that, your practice increases your knowledge (flexibility/ strength to extend the metaphor) so you will be increasingly able to make greater advances in your saving and budgeting. Once you reach a plateau of savings, you can look at ways to challenge yourself just as you would in yoga.
Save an extra 1% or $50 every week, or pay some extra off your mortgage, and see the rewards as the accrue over time.
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