When you aspire to get to a state of financial independence or stability, living within your means is the best advice you can follow. When you say you live within your means, this means your lifestyle is perfectly aligned to how much you earn.
This is significant to incorporate in your financial life because it helps you practice self-control and discipline in your wealth and finances.
It helps you prioritize your expenses and budget accordingly to your means. In this article, we’ll be talking about 7 important reasons to live within your means.
What Does It Mean To Live Within Your Means?
Living within your means is more than just controlling your urges to buy everything you want, but it’s also adjusting your way of life. Your lifestyle and the things you want should be aligned to or even less than your overall income.
When your lifestyle exceeds your income, you’ll be dealing with difficult financial problems that you could have avoided if you were able to live within your means. When you make it a habit to live adequately – not luxuriously, but also not too average – then you’ll have more than enough at the end of the day.
You never know what could happen in life and living within your means also ensures you have emergency funds when something does happen.
7 Important Reasons To Live Within Your Means
1. Living debt-free
When you have the discipline to live according to your means, you live a debt-free life which means you don’t have to worry about paying those debts monthly.
More often than not, these debts are credit card debts that you have because you chose to purchase something you can’t pay for yet.
Credit cards are useful for emergencies, but if you don’t need something, you can let go of not buying it in the meantime. This will give you more peace than buying something impulsively.
2. Less stress
Living within your means has its many benefits, one of them being that you’re less stressed in your financial life.
Since you aren’t stressing over where all your money went or how to pay the bills while still getting the life you want, you have fewer things to worry about. You have a perfectly balanced financial life where you’re still able to afford your needs.
3. You can secure your future
When you live according to your means, this also means you have more than enough to save for your future.
This is a great way to afford the kind of future you want because you may not live a luxurious lifestyle now, but you can do that in the future since you’re living within your means.
It really just all comes down to priorities and which things are a need – those are the things you should focus on today.
4. You achieve financial freedom
Financial freedom means that you no longer have to worry about your expenses matching your income as you’ve reached a financial situation that lets you not worry about that. While this isn’t easy to attain, you reach financial freedom by having the discipline to live within your means.
When you don’t spend as much on unnecessary things, you can save and let your money work for you through investments and insurance. These are known ways of achieving the financial freedom that lets you live any lifestyle you want.
5. You feel the freedom
When you aren’t held back by debt or financial worries, it lifts so much burden off you. You live a simpler and more mundane life and this makes you freer.
This also gives you more than enough space to focus on the things that truly matter and prioritizing your budget into fewer categories. Having a lavish lifestyle certainly has its perks, but it can be stressful to decide if you’re going to buy something or not.
6. You don’t hoard unnecessary things
When you can afford to buy everything you want, it feels great, but it also results in buying unnecessary things you barely need.
Impulsive spending is a real thing and this is just one of the more obvious reasons why living within your means is a great decision. It gives you fewer worries and it helps you avoid hoarding material objects.
7. You gain wealth
I know you’re probably thinking about how you could possibly gain wealth when you’re living within your means.
Having the discipline and mindset allows you to spend only when necessary, which will leave you shocked at how much you can truly save in a month – especially when you accumulate that in a year.
You’re much closer to achieving wealth when you live this way compared to spending your money however you like it.
How To Live Within Your Means
If you’ve decided to live within your means, the first step is to have the mindset to go through with it. Not everyone can pull this off as it’s so easy to spend on the things you want, especially with the consumerist world we live in today.
To live within your means, you need to prioritize your needs, which are your bills and your necessities primarily. The things you want will have to wait such as those shoes you’ve been eyeing or that latest iPhone that just got released.
It’s not easy but if you think about the impact of your decisions on your future, you’ll thank yourself eventually.
Living within your means is the best way to achieve your desired state of financial freedom.
Final Thoughts
I hope this article was able to shed insight on everything you needed to know about living within your means. If you’re going to choose a specific lesson to incorporate that will benefit your financial life, choose to live according to your means.
Not only will your future self thank you later for this decision, but it adds more security and peace in your life when you know that your finances are under control to live an adequate life.