Living Rich

Peter has long been victim to my endless complaints of the fleeting nature of our 20s and 30s. As he points out, it’s a regular cycle every few months that, under the duress of work demands, I approach the precipice of internal crisis. Because our end goals are so far away, they can often feel nebulous. This combined with the visage of sacrifice in the present create for distress with which Peter has a difficult time empathizing. Without anything to look forward to in the short term, it’s easy for me to succumb to discouragement. Serendipitously, we found an enlightening and instructive video by Ramit Sethi to palliate this feeling.

In this guide, he lays out a strategy to living a richer life in terms of experiences. He focuses on the idea that many people have wishlists, though these wishes may never actually materialize. This is because most people are notoriously bad at committing to plans, whether that is financing, planning, or committing to the trip. We’ve both struggled with this as well, often making statements to each other of “It’d be nice to do X” or “I’d like to travel to Y someday.” Our biggest fear? That before we know it, the year will have passed us by with significant time squandered. Multiply this by years and we’ve lost decades or even a lifetime of potential experiences all due to directionless thinking. Ramit’s video helped us to lay out a roadmap of achievable experiences for this coming year, and we’re excited to see how it’ll unfold.

We particularly like that he encourages us to plan events, experiences, and travel by year so that we may be intentional around the seasons. The first step mentioned in this video is to come up with a theme. This will be the glue that underlies all the plans—the motif that will string together and set the tone for the year. This is my favorite teaching from Ramit’s strategy because it provides structure and organization to what I’d like to accomplish. Without the structure and organization, I lose focus and get overwhelmed by a swirl of things that I want to get done. Ramit gives several examples to illustrate the point, such as a year focused on “beauty,” wherein you would anchor all events around exploring all things aesthetic: nature, architecture, art, galleries, landscapes, design, and more. This means that instead of rushing to do every tourist trap activity when traveling to Paris, you focus on experiences that will immerse you in the beauty of the city and country.

For ourselves, we’ve chosen to go with the theme of cozy. For us, this means spending time with people we love in small, intimate settings. We want for this year to not only highlight but cultivate memories with friends and family. We do not find a particular longing for sightseeing and traveling as much as we do for spending slow-paced days with the people in our lives. We also want our environments to reflect that, so the travels we are planning are going to focus more on ambiance. Perhaps we’re getting old or have had too much hustling and bustling as of late, but we’re ready to take a slow year. The type of things we hope to plan for this coming year are the emotional equivalent of hot cocoa by the fireplace.

The next few steps that Ramit outlines are a little more obvious. Essentially, have a calendar to write down all the glorious plans swirling in your head. Commit them to paper so that there is a literal and physical roadmap to getting that done. This is probably Peter’s favorite piece of advice. He immediately opened Notion and started detailing the entire year by month. We decided that long holiday weekends would be spent with family while dedicating our PTO to seeing friends from all over the country. This is extremely daunting because we do not live in a vacuum and it requires coordination with all the people we want to spend time with. Who is possibly going to know their plans for October when we are only in February? At least, that was my thought and worry. Surprisingly, we’ve already put out feelers, and our plans have been met with very warm enthusiasm. It is reassuring to know that others are willing to carve out time months in advance to see us. Needless to say, our calendar already has a multitude of events planned, with at least one or two tentatively per month.

Though I was initially overwhelmed by the sheer amount of cognitive effort that goes into planning a whole year’s worth of trips, events, and gatherings, I’m so much more relieved now. I’m relieved not only because this saves me time and effort from planning later in the year, but it gives me something to look forward to every month. In fact, this feels like the most optimal use of our time in gathering life experience points. I can also plan my work schedule around various months with more precision as well, whether it is extra shifts for savings or to rack up PTO to spend. This also gives us a really good estimate of how much we will spend for the coming year in terms of travel, which leads us to a major point in Ramit’s video.

Peter and I already have a system set up for financing our trips and experiences. We have separate buckets of money for travel, gifting, and experiences. We are fortunate to have the resources that we do, so that we may forego Ramit’s strategy altogether. His strategy is simple though: calculate the overall budget for any event and allocate money to it monthly. For example, if we wanted a $5,000 trip to Paris this year in December and it is only February, that gives us 10 months to save up. This means portioning $500 per month dedicated to guilt-free spending on the trip. Peter and I have allocated a set amount per year for our travels and work to stay under that budget, which has been my preferred method. Much to his chagrin, however, I have continuously expanded the budget more and more.

This was a quick summary of the video and we’d encourage you to watch it yourselves! We do think it’s worth the minutes and maybe it’ll change how approach planning as well. After all, if the goal is to live a richer, fuller life there needs to be some intentionality. Click here to watch the video!