Questionnaire for issuing a personalized card for payments in the Wish Shop
1. Indicate your age (how old you are today).
2. Think about and estimate how many total years you will live. And choose one of three options:
a) 60 years old (Pessimist tariff);
b) 85 years (Realist tariff);
c) 100 years and more (Optimist tariff).
3. Indicate the number of years you “approximately” have left to live. To do this, subtract the first answer from the second answer, according to the chosen tariff.
4. Calculate and indicate your minimum annual/monthly income.
5. Calculate and state your expenses per year/month. (This includes all mandatory payments: loans, alimony, taxes, rent, travel expenses, maintenance of personal transportation, telephone and internet charges, hairdresser and all those services you cannot do without in your daily life).
6. Indicate how much spare money you have on hand after expenses are subtracted from your income. In year/month format.
7. Indicate how much free time you have on a typical weekday. (Sleep time, lunches at work, and weekends do not count.) In day/month/year format.
8. Indicate how many free weekends you have available, including vacations. In month/year format.
Once you have completed the questionnaire, you can issue yourself your own personalized card for shopping at the Wish Store. It should look something like the one in my picture (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
As you have already realized, we have three types of currency on the map: money, time and weekend. But the most important thing is that they have one thing in common, they are free. And this is a mandatory criterion. In addition, like a regular bank card, this card can also be replenished. To do this, you will need to make a new calculation taking into account the updated data.
But first, you need to think and remember which wishes you have purchased over the last year and which wishes you are paying for right now. It won’t be hard to figure this out, if you have a very sad looking balance on your card, then most likely you have already purchased on that card. And therefore the purchase of new wishes will be unavailable to you.
Accordingly, in order to replenish the card, you need to start earning more or reduce your expenses. As for time, in order to increase it, you should at least learn to plan your time, but ideally you need to follow time management based on your plan. And if you don’t have a plan, the first thing you need to do is create one. I’ll talk more about how to do that later.
What is important for us now is not even the card balance itself. But the very fact of understanding that our desires are a commodity that has its own price. And just like any other product, after buying it, we may face the fact that this product does not fit our size or has expired. That is, it may have the same properties as any other product. But, unlike material things, desires cannot be returned to the seller. Since no one will give you back your time. And from what you will choose desires, so your life will be formed.
And our problem is that we are always dreaming about something, wishing and imagining that if I had this or that, then I would be happier. But in fact, often after we get what we want, we quickly forget about it and switch to new desires.
Now try to remember how many of your “wants” you have realized and where is it all now? Have you become happier? Or has it all caused you more trouble than joy? Think about it.
Wish List
Now let’s do a very useful thing. Try to write down 3—4 wishes or goals that are important to you on a piece of paper. Exactly those that you want to realize during the year. These can be not only some big purchases, but also significant personal achievements for you.
Once you have made your wish list, try to evaluate each wish in the three currencies mentioned above. To do this, you need to ask the following questions:
– How much time do you need to spend to achieve this goal? This could be years, months, days or hours.
– How much money do you need to spend?
– How many days off do you need to take to realize your desire?
– What additional conditions do you need to create in order to achieve this goal?
To make it clearer, let me give you an example (see Figure 3).
Figure 3
The more specific you are about your desires and the conditions for achieving them, the easier it will be for you to plan your life. Since you will already understand the real price of your desires and the conditions that need to be created. In the future, these records will still be useful to you.
And now that you understand all this, take another look at your list. Perhaps, after your evaluation, you are already reluctant to realize any of your desires. Especially after looking at your balance on the card.
I realize that this is unusual for you and may look silly, but trust me, this is how it works. We need to visually see information about our resources and information about prices so that we have a “sober” assessment of our needs and possibilities in our heads.
When we dream about something, that’s good. But when we spend money and time recklessly, on things we just want to buy, that’s bad, especially if you’re doing it on a credit card.
In general, if we talk about spontaneous purchases, we can say that this is an extremely unjustified behavior. If you have specific goals and desires, then to realize them you need to spend resources on them, not on fleeting needs. Because with these actions you deprive yourself of the opportunity to realize your goal in the time frame you planned earlier. But this is about respecting your choice and self-discipline, and we will talk about it later, now it is important to deal with our desires.
As you may have already realized, there are some desires that require only money. These are, as a rule, the purchase of household appliances, real estate, vehicles, and any material goods that make our life more comfortable and pleasant. Let’s put them in the first category of complexity. We will assign the second category of complexity to desires that require not only money but also time. To the third category we will refer complex desires, those for the realization of which, in addition to money and time, we need additional conditions.
So, let’s look at a situation where you want to buy an expensive apartment or car. You don’t have the money to buy it now. And you are faced with a choice: take out a loan and survive on the remaining money or increase your income and earn the necessary amount. But this is only a choice that lies on the surface. And, as a rule, it puts you in a dead end. After all, you don’t want to take out a loan and at the same time you don’t understand how you can increase your income. Since, if you think about it, you have a good job, where you are slowly but surely climbing the career ladder, receive bonuses, you are valued and respected. And in general, you have everything like everyone else – “work – home – work”. You work from morning till evening, and you need to have time for home and family matters. And you face the question: “Where will the extra income come from?” After all, you have no free time.
The answer, unfortunately, does not lie on the surface, but I will show it to you.
The fact is that we have new desires and needs in our heads all the time, and as a rule, they are layered on top of each other. Today we may think that we need to go on vacation to the sea, as our acquaintance did.