A good friend of mine was asking me advice on home mortgages specifically if he should just go to the bank or try a private lender. He actually had three options: the bank, a mortgage broker or a private lender in Montreal, and he was getting so stressed and worked up about it. So I told him to take a chill pill and simplify.
Brokers obviously took a cut as their commission, so he crossed out the middleman and that left him with two. The bank was full of the usual paperwork, credit checks and costly home appraisal just to get approval and he needed it fast, so he crossed out the bank and was left with the private lender where the process was a simple pre-qualification by phone and he’d get the money in 72 hours.
He simplified his options by eliminating the ones that were either too stressful to deal with or taking too long. You can apply this simplification strategy into anything that’s giving you stress in your life.
A Simple Beginning
I always heard the term “simplify” when I was growing up, but I never really understood what it meant. Everytime I ran into a problem I couldn’t solve, my dad would tell me to simplify the process and focus on the solution with the most potential. If that didn’t work, just rinse and repeat.
It went on like this until I moved out of the house. Out of all the advice my dad gave me, “simplify” is my all time favorite and by far the easiest one to apply. But how do you simplify?
Simplify your Life
You can simplify all areas of your life right now. Just think of all the things that are complicating your everyday life and take the necessary steps to reduce these complications. Make a list of the areas you want to simplify.
For example, you would like to simplify your online presence. Ask yourself if you really need to join all the social media networks available or if you need all those email addresses. Google+, Facebook, Instagram, flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest – these are only some of the big names in social media you probably made an account with. Do you really need all of them? Choose one and ditch the rest.
Simplify your Home
Is your home full of clutter? Humans have a tremendous propensity to accumulate stuff. I’ve proven it. It happened to me before and I swore not to let it happen again. Take a look around your house and see if there’s anything out of place or just lying around. Ask yourself if you can survive without it. If you can, throw it away, recycle it or donate it. You can even sell it for extra income if it still holds value.
A perfect example is your electronic life. Do you really need all those gadgets? Why do you need two phones and three tablets? Get rid of the ones you don’t really use. I personally own just a laptop and a smartphone. That’s all I’ll ever need. Save yourself from the hassle of owning too much. You won’t be able to use it all anyway.
Simplify your spending
I almost never use credit cards anymore. For conveniences’ sake and for dire emergencies, I only have one, but I never use it to buy anything. The idea of borrowing money to buy something you can’t afford is really troubling to me. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it! Never buy anything because you want to. Buy when you absolutely need to.
When it comes to paying the bills, don’t get suckered into using your credit card as well. Don’t get lured into using it to pad your points for “rewards” because when you take a closer look at it, you’ll need to spend a ton of money just so you can get a free blender you could’ve easily bought at a thrift store for cheap. Set up a bank account to handle all your bills payments, set it on auto-pilot and quit worrying about it. Compute how much your bills are per month and set up an auto-debit scheme where the account you set up to handle all your bills will get X amount per month from your main bank account.
A Simple Conclusion
The trick here is to reduce and eliminate everything you don’t need in your life. Anything in excess of what you really need will only give you grief, stress and needless worry. Once you get down to the bare essentials, you’ll live your life deliberately and with purpose. You can focus on what’s most important in your life instead of having your time wasted and divided.
