Looking at Money in New Ways
By Steve Gillman
If you have never tried looking at money in new ways, you're
missing out on some possibly meaningful and profitable perspectives.
What do I mean by looking at it in new ways? I'll explain by
starting with a seemingly simple question: How much money do
you make?
There are some standard responses to that (if the question
is answered at all). We normally and automatically start discussing
how much we make based on annual pay or hourly wages, and sometimes
the weekly or biweekly paycheck--before or after taxes. There
is nothing wrong with any of these ways of looking at the money
we make.
But there are many other ways to measure your pay. For example,
we might do it by outcome. If you work in a factory your income
might average forty cents per piece assembled, even though you
are paid $12 per hour. Does it matter if we think of it this
way? Perhaps. If you saw it from this perspective, pointed it
out to your employer, and then found a way to double your speed,
you might get the boss to pay you thirty cents per piece assembled,
saving the company 25% on labor but making you 50% more per hour
(40 cents per piece at $12/hour equals 30 per hour, double that
and 60 pieces per hour at 30 cents equals $18 per hour).
But we can broaden our ways of looking at money beyond a per/hour
to per/piece comparison. For example, you might You consider
what you make after all "necessary bills are paid"
which might mean you make only a dollar of discretionary pay
for each of your forty hours at work each week. It may sound
depressing. but then again, it can lead you to see that if you
maintain your current necessary expenses and make $80 more per
week, you triple the amount of money which you can spend as you
like.
That is the real point of playing around with our money perspectives--to
find better ways to do things. new ways of looking at things
allows for new ideas to surface in our minds. As another example,
a restaurant employee who realizes he is being paid sixty cents
per pizza might then realize that he can make that much on six
times as many pizzas each day if he is the owner of his own pizzeria.
Or a man who sees that his hated job pays him two weeks of travel
time annually might find a job with a lower paycheck in dollars,
but which requires him to travel to interesting places twenty
weeks each year.
This isn't just about employment either. You can measure your
business "profits" in terms of the free-time you get
- or by how many hours of the work you enjoy. Doing so might
make you reconsider how you to make your money.
On the spending end of the equation, many people look at money
primarily in terms of what things they can buy with it. There
is nothing inherently wrong with that, but I prefer to looking
at money in terms of what situations it can buy. For example,
it can buy some degree of security, a lot of knowledge, and it
definitely can buy freedom of a sort, if it is used in the right
ways. How it is used, of course, starts with how we look at it.
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