It’s over 30 years since I first started working on the family farm for my dad.
At the end of each week he’d give me a little brown envelope with cash in for the number of hours that I’d done.
And I’d usually spend some of that cash and pop some in the bank.
It was really easy for me to keep track of how much I had left and pace my expenditure.
All my early jobs were like that.
Fast forward 3 decades and I rarely use cash.
The vast majority of my expenditure is from automated payments or I wave my phone at a card reader.
It’s much easier this way to overspend and find that there’s too much month left at the end of the money.
And this is the world my children are having to learn to navigate.
I’m not sure my youngest will ever particularly use cash all that much before it stops being a thing.
This blog isn’t about the pros and cons of such changes, so no one needs to reply with their opinions on this situation.
It is, as most of my blogs are, an analogy.
Food is much like contactless payments.
Easy to overspend on.
If we could literally see the calorie cost of the food in front of us as we ate, we’d probably stop “spending” earlier.
If we have weight that we would like to lose, I would wager you that we’ve only eaten 10 to 30% more than we needed to over the time frame that we gained the weight.
If every meal that was put in front of us had been, say, 80% black (for what we could “afford”) and 20% red (for what would put us into “debt”)………
Then we probably wouldn’t have “spent” that extra 20%, would we?
Whilst we can lament the inevitable death of cash, it’s not going to change.
We’ll just have to learn to navigate paths to make it work.
And whilst we could lament the easier availability of high calorie density, hyperpalatable foods, that isn’t going to change either.
We just need to find a way to navigate that path (maybe with proven help here? —> www.myrise.co.uk/apply) .
Spend within our means.
And not run up debt that we will struggle to pay off.
Much love,
Jon ‘Free Direct’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
