Don’t Save Money!

You must have heard people advising you to save money, and as long as you are a working dude in his twenties, then you should save a big cut from your earnings. Their advice is always followed by: “You never know what happens, you will need it one day!”.

Allow me to say that for youngsters, such advice leads to a waste of capabilities and puts their potentially brilliant future at stake.

Why? When it comes to money management, the thing most people miss is that money is not an actual value by itself, rather is a way to transfer a value one may provide in return of another value. For example, your salary reflects the means through which you transfer the effort you exert (a value for the employer) to a tangible service or product you buy (a value for you), using money from your salary.

Once we acknowledge that money is only a mediator between values, what happens when keep saving money for years and years, and never spend it? We work hard to make money, we provide a value, but we decide to delay our earned value for few or many years. But what happens meanwhile? This might sound harsh but; we get expired. Yes! Humans have an expiration date.

Food, as a commodity, has an expiration date that conveys whether this food is edible or not. In other words, when this commodity reaches its threshold “expiration date”, this specific commodity can no longer compete with other similar commodities. The same happens to humans, your expiration date is when you cannot compete with others, not as an edible commodity of course, but as a person with value, which in many cases, comes in the shape of skills and competencies that a job requires.

So, let’s look at the bigger picture here. I hold a full-time job, only save money and delay gaining any other value, except for “money”, in return. My ability to provide and produce shrinks with time and suddenly, years after, I realize that I’m literally getting expired, where I’m no longer an interesting person for any company to hire; all I possess is years of the same redundant boring experience. Why? Cause I only made money to save it, not to spend it!

Let’s, hypothetically, agree that saving money is not a good idea, then what should I do with the money? Ok, spend it? On what? And that’s the one million dollar question. Here, I step in to share some personal insights on what every young Man should do with the money he/she makes:

1. Learn; spend your money on learning new skills. Attend selected courses in universities like Stanford Continued Learning, subscribe for online courses like Udemy (if you like video classes),  register for coding (or other topics) bootcamps like General Assembly, or even hire an expert to teach you a new skill on Clarity.fm. Just focus on learning, what you spend here and now will pay off in the future.

2. Have fun; spend your money on having a great time, enjoy life with friends, girlfriend or alone. Do outdoor activities like camping, indoor leisure like board games, read comics, try new restaurants, travel and explore, or simply do anything you like. Doing so wisely, will allow you to be a better person and do a better job. If you don’t invest in having silly time, your ability to have serious time gets chunked with time.

3. Nurture a hobby; spend your money on an activity (or many) that you have been craving for since so long. Do you like dancing, fishing, surf boarding, diving, fighting, writing, drawing or cooking? Just pick a hobby and search for a school or an expert and pay them to teach you. This hobby will teach you time management, help you meet new awesome people, and by default make you more interesting for others. You will catch the eye; success and money love interesting people!

4. Love; yes love, spend money on people you love. If that doesn’t make you happy, then I think you have a bigger problem than money management. Nothing could motivate you to produce more than a smile you draw on the face of your girlfriend, mom, or sister. Did I only mention females? Love whom ever you want, and keep loving.

If you keep doing all of that, you will find yourself more capable of making money. Each year you notice the difference in you, and you will see that you are a better version of yourself. You will actually feel that you will never get expired. So, don’t save money, spend it on what matters.