You Only Live Once

The Roadmap to Financial Wellness and a Purposeful Life

Jason Vitug

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119267423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Get your finances in order with smart budgeting and money mindfulness

You Only Live Once is the guide to achieving your best life through smart money moves. Before you even begin making a budget, you need to think about why. Where do you see yourself financially in ten years? Five years? This time next year? What does money do for you? Once you know your destination, you can begin charting your course. Step-by-step guidance walks you through the budgeting process, and shows you how to plan your financial path to point toward your goals. You'll learn how to prioritize spending, how to save efficiently, and how to take advantage of simple tools you didn't know you had. Next comes the most important part: taking control. You need to really look at how you perceive and use money day-to-day. Chances are, changing a few habits could give you some breathing room and help you reach your goals sooner.

You work hard for your money, yet there never seems to be enough. You don't need to live like a pauper, but you need to be truly aware of just where your money is going, and why. Financial awareness is the key to a financially secure future, and this book unpacks it all to help you get where you want to go.

• Accept past decisions and articulate your financial goals
• Align your lifestyle with your budget
• Explore your relationship with money
• Re-evaluate financial habits and behaviors

You know you need a budget, but you never seem to get around to doing it. Or maybe you did, but you can never seem to stick to it. Smart planning is a major factor in financial security, and it involves just as much introspection as math. You Only Live Once is more than a budgeting guide—it's a guide to revamping your financial behaviors to achieve the life you want.

Part I
On the Road to Financial Wellness

In the summer of 2015, I went on an epic road trip called the Road to Financial Wellness. The road trip was a grassroots and social media experiment to turn local money discussions into a national conversation on financial well-being. My team and I drove 10,218 miles in 30 days, zigzagging across the country and speaking with over 8,000 people in 38 states during the month of June. Our mission was to break the last social taboo—money—and empower people through stories that would educate and inspire them to learn more about personal finance and to live their dream lifestyles.

I wanted people to understand that financial success—however you choose to define that success—only matters if you’ve found a balance between money and life. I used the term financial wellness to describe that state of living in which your well-being is measured by the quality of your life, not just by wealth.

On the road trip I asked seminar attendees to think of their lives as their very own road-trip adventures. We all have a start and an end point. We may not have any control over where we start, but we decide where we end up. The path you choose, the skills you acquire, and the tools you use can go a long way in making your road trip an enjoyable and rewarding ride.

Imagine yourself planning a trip across the country, with a starting point in New York City and an end point on the West Coast. You set off on your adventure with excitement but soon realize you were ill prepared for the journey: The car you chose wasn’t well-maintained, and the roads you took at times were scenic but mostly were uninteresting. You relied on your smartphone for a GPS, not knowing that in some parts of the country the service would be unreliable. You got lost and ran out of gas. You sped down small town roads and got a speeding ticket. You had a flat tire, but you had a spare and the skill to change it. When the engine began to sputter, you found yourself stranded by the roadside, questioning your decision to go on the road trip in the first place. Finally, you arrived. You reached the West Coast with your swimming shorts, surfboard, and suntan lotion, but you found yourself in Seattle, not San Diego.

A road trip has twists and turns and unexpected surprises. Sometimes the path is a straight and wide highway, and other times it’s a narrow winding road. Most times you’re coasting along, enjoying the scenery. Other times, you’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

You can easily replace those road-trip terms with money terms to represent your financial journey. You grew up in a household with a particular financial situation, but you had a vision for your own life. You weren’t exactly sure how you wanted to live, but you knew the things you wanted to do. You didn’t grow up with an understanding of personal finances, but you did learn some useful skills that have helped along the way. But as you navigated to adulthood, things began to change unnoticeably. You thought of things, not dreams. You relied heavily on a job for income until it was gone. You paid more in banking fees than you had in your savings account. When you were facing financial difficulties, you questioned your actions. You once had a vision for your life but are now living a life you can’t recognize and are set on a directionless path.

You’ve made financial mistakes, but rest assured, as long as you’re still in the driver’s seat, you can change course and choose a more scenic path to enjoy the ride and reach your destination.

Take what you’ve learned. Gain clarity about your vision of life. Set your destination. Now, hop back in your car with a renewed passion, a better plan, and improved skills that will get you from Seattle to San Diego.

Chapter 1
Are You Living YOLO?

I used to hear YOLO more often exclaimed while shopping at the mall or taking shots at the bar.

It didn’t matter what part of the country I was in or the generations that made up the group I spoke to. People would laugh when I used the term YOLO. What was it about YOLO that elicited that response? Was it coming from a place of youthful and joyful carelessness? Or was it a reaction of nervous laughter?

Mae West was quoted as saying, “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

I wouldn’t have thought that someone born in the late 1890s could capture a millennial motto so perfectly. Maybe it’s a mindset of any generation born before the turn of any century. Or maybe it’s that the desire to live a purposeful life runs across all generations.

The Millennial Experience

I am a member of Generation Y and proudly accept the word millennial to describe my generation, the first to grow into adulthood in this millennium. My baby-boomer parents worked toward a purposeful life, and I am a product of their hopes and dreams. They taught me the valuable lesson that life was hard, but life had meaning. They raised me to believe that I could accomplish anything, and that I should strive to live my dreams. Holding these beliefs to be true, I grew up with a sense of entitlement—that I was entitled to live a life with meaning.

What has happened outside of our households has influenced my generation’s view of the world and our place in it as well. As millennials, we experienced the dot-com crash of the late 1990s and the Great Recession during our formative years of personal and career development. We’ve lived in a constant state of war and terror for most of our lives. We saw the greed of Wall Street and the material excesses of our parents, who bought larger cars and bigger homes, and used equity to finance uncontrolled spending. Then the stock market crashed and our families were faced with financial hardships because of layoffs, home foreclosures, and reduced retirement savings.

It isn’t a surprise that as a result of how we grew up, we adopted the motto YOLO (which stands for You Only Live Once) as an expression of the uncertainty of tomorrow. Our motto means that you should seize the moment as it happens without a thought about money. We have used our desire to live a carefree life and our uncertainty about our future as guiding principles in making financial decisions. YOLO explains our irrational spending behavior and our preference for experiences over things.

The YOLO Mindset

YOLO has influenced our behaviors around banking, saving, spending, and investing. We don’t value banks in the traditional sense; we prefer the experience of convenient apps and personal service to meet our banking needs. We know the importance of saving money, but saving is often delayed in favor of paying off student loans—a debt we took on to pay for education we were told we needed to get our dream jobs—or spending on experiences to make up for all the time spent at work and on our side hustles. The YOLO mindset about saving means you’re aware of what you value and willing to invest your time to attain it.

We are a generation that loves to share socially—a result of our parents teaching us to share with others. This has made us more susceptible to peer influence and social-marketing tactics, which has influenced our spending habits. We buy things and experiences we don’t want in order to give others the illusion of happy lives on social media. We have become compelled to shop more because of targeted ads that follow us online from retailers who know our habits—spending habits we weren’t aware we had.

This mindless and uncontrolled spending means allocating more of your future time to work. I personally don’t believe in the notion that we must stop all spending. Spending is a part of living. You’re spending on what you need and what you want. However, when you’re spending mindlessly, you’re not in control. I advocate spending money where it matters, and that means being clear about your values—knowing what matters most to you. If in order to buy things you don’t value you must spend more time at work, then how much of your life are you actually living? The YOLO mindset about spending means you’re aware of what’s important and won’t sacrifice a lifetime of happiness for short-term gratification.

Growing up during a period that saw two economic crashes has had a profound impact on how we view investing in the stock market, too. We see investing as risky, but we’ve also seen how quickly the market can recover. Investing is a great way to cultivate a lifestyle of less work by making money with money. The YOLO mindset can be used to prioritize asset building over salary increases. If you only live once, building assets to generate income is the most effective use of your time.

As an older millennial, the YOLO mindset is ingrained in my psyche, and I, too, have used YOLO as an excuse to make irrational financial decisions, but eventually I learned the true value of living YOLO. As the years have gone by, I’ve learned that tomorrow is as real as today, and the financial choices we make now have a big impact on the life we live in the future. If we only live once, let’s make decisions that support a healthy and financially stress-free lifestyle.

The YOLO mindset is ideal when applied to the understanding that today is the best day to start saving, investing, and spending mindfully in order to live a purposeful life. Living YOLO is awareness that our time is our most valuable asset, and that once it is spent, it cannot be repurchased at any price. Time therefore should be used wisely, so that you’re doing more of the things you value and fewer of the things you don’t. For example:

• Saving. You should be aware of what you value and be willing to invest your time to achieve your goals.
• Spending. What you spend money on is a reflection of your values. Spend on things that matter the most to you and add value in your life.
• Debt. Debt reserves your future time for work rather than fun. Prioritize debt elimination to gain more time for living.
• Investing. Growing your assets decreases your need to exchange your time for income. Make money with money.

Remain mindful of your YOLO mindset and how it’s impacting your financial behavior. As you continue reading, you’ll gain more awareness and can apply this mindset to creating a vision for your life, gaining clarity about your values, and setting the right financial goals.

Chapter 2
Financial Education and Living Your Dream Lifestyle

I’m a big fan of financial education. Mastering finances is an important life skill because it has such a drastic impact on how you get to live your life and when you get to live it. The more skilled you are in handling money, the less susceptible you will be to making financial mistakes that can derail your efforts to live the life you want. Financial education can help you manage your money more effectively, leading to saving more, earning more, and spending wisely on things that matter.

During my seminars I ask my audience this question: “Why do we learn how to calculate the area of a triangle but not the power of compound...