Aaron Kiely - The Minimalist Budget: Mindset of the Successful: Save More Money and Spend Less with the #1 Minimalism Guide to Personal Finance, Money Management Skills, and Simple Living Strategies

The Minimalist Budget: Mindset of the Successful

Save More Money and Spend Less with the #1 Minimalism Guide to Personal Finance, Money Management Skills, and Simple Living Strategies

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Introduction

C ongratulations on downloading The Minimalist Budget and thank you for doing so.

The following book will teach you how to change the way you think about your finances, control your spending and match it to the things you value in life, and find that thousands of people live a fulfilling life without depending on the short-term excitement of purchasing.

Using proven strategies and examples from successful people, you will explore the broad mindset behind the structure of a minimalist budget before going into the details of how to manage your personal finances, grow wealth, and prepare for the future.

No matter how tangled your finances are or how trapped you feel, you can find your way out and get yourself on track for living a comfortable life free of worry about whether or not you will have enough money. Whether you are a picture of a hopeless case or just looking for ways to step up your game, this book has something for you. By the end, you will know your values and goals, have a balanced bank account, and know how to make and keep to the right budget for your income and lifestyle.

There are plenty of books on this subject on the market, so thanks again for choosing this one! Every effort was made to ensure it is full of as much useful information as possible. Please enjoy!

Part ILiving More on Less

Chapter 1: What is Minimalism?

I f you got this book , you probably have a little background in the idea of minimalism. Books, videos, and blog posts all record the sagas of people who get rid of all our possessions to live voluntarily out of a suitcase or two. You seem a little crazy, whether you want to be like them or not, and our ability to live without all the things that modern life deems essential mystifies the mind.

This book is not going to tell you that you must get rid of all but a hundred of your possessions to be a successful minimalist. You could have only one hundred possessions and still live beyond your means. Minimalism is less about how much you own and more about how you own the things you have. What I want to explore is the mindset toward the things you own that form the foundation of a minimalist lifestyle.

While the Minimalist movement gained modern popularity with The Minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, the practice of minimalism and the ideas behind it go far back in history. Both philosophers and ordinary people discovered that material possessions failed to provide them with fulfilling lives and set about looking for meaning elsewhere. Monks of various religions vowed themselves to poverty and left society to focus entirely on our spiritual health, only to be followed by the people you wished to leave behind because these people saw that these ascetics possessed a purpose and contentment that you did not. Mainstream wisdom connected fulfillment with wealth and prestige and generation after generation discovered that material success brought troubles of its own. Happiness, Aristotle wrote, is to be found in something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end towards which our actions are directed. Wealth is evidently not the good you are seeking, for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

This knowledge, regarded as minimalism, reminds us that the things you own ought to be a means to an end, not an end of themselves. What you own and how much you own matters a great deal less than the way you interact with it. Belongings are meant to help you live the kind of life you desire to live, and often, people find that things getting in the way. There are two ways to react to this. Materialist culture says that we will live the way we want to when we have enough things. We will relax when we have the right recreational equipment. We will get fit when you have the perfect in-home gym. Our children will be happy with the right toys and games. We will be beautiful when we own the right clothes. Yet it never matters how much we buyit never fulfills its intended purpose of improving our lives long-term. At worst, our houses become full of things, impossible to clean, utterly overwhelming, and we find our quality of life going down. `Rather than clearing out, we buy more furniture and square footage in homes and sheds to provide a place for all our belongings to live. Rather than being served by our belongings, we are trapped caring for things that we may never use and perhaps no longer even want.