What are meagerfindings?
Meager what now?
Kind of a strange name. Meager isn’t usually a positive description right? Lets check:
Definition of meager:
meager
adjective mea·ger \ ˈmē-gər \
1 : having little flesh : thin
2 a : lacking desirable qualities (such as richness or strength)
2 b : deficient in quality or quantity
“Meager.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 5 Aug. 2018.
Okay, yeah, not the most positive name for a website. So why do I call my site meagerfindings?
These are my humble opinions
I am not a personal finance guru, or a certified financial planner, or particularly gifted at math. I haven’t clawed my way out of massive debt. I haven’t come up with some stock-picking scheme to get rich quick. I haven’t “bought” a house yet. I did not suddenly think up a flawless path to financial independence.
These are not profound findings
I don’t have a master plan, instead I am finding life-hacks, tips, tricks, bonuses, deals, setbacks, pitfalls, and value in unexpected places. A lot of the findings I surface are run of the mill ideas or concepts, sometimes with a novel twist.
These meager findings make all the difference
Thankfully, we don’t need profound, draw dropping realizations to completely alter our lives. They sure do help and we are thankful when we get divine inspiration/feedback. However, most the time, we live life day-to-day. Despite what action-thriller movies, shows, and novels exhibit, our lives probably won’t be decided by the heroic actions of one to five 24 hour periods of time. I don’t live the life of Jack Bauer, far from it. Instead the trajectory of my life is an accumulation of day by day, hour by hour choices. Sure there are some milestone moments that ratchet things into high-speed, but most of the time, it’s the small choices that make up the overall results.
- Do I choose to go to the gym today or do I give into not feeling like lifting heavy things today?
- Do I choose look the other way and not deal with what I just saw him do?
- Do I invest that extra $100 or should I buy 5 cases of Bounty Bars on Amazon?
These are all value choices. And to be honest, most of them are very small choices that in isolation will not have a large impact on my life. However if I start repeating these choices, there can be profound consequences to even the most innocent of these choices.
For instance, as I approached finishing up my second bachelors degree, I began to notice that my waistline was expanding. Turns out that while I was a full-time student and still working full-time, I started making choices to forgo working out, sleeping, and eating healthily in order to push through to graduation. Thankfully, its also the small choices of spending 45 minutes to an hour at the gym, doing only 3 exercises per visit, but increasing the weight on the bar each time that is also leading me to be in the best shape of my life at the age of 31. It all started with the choice to show up and lift an empty bar though, and then to show up again and add a few pounds more each time.
Making the choice to show up and put the work in truly makes a difference over the course of many months.
For some higher level examples, play around with my FiCalculator to see the difference that additional savings can make when compound interest is applied.
There are countless additional meager findings that add up to outsized results and I hope to reveal more of these every day choices that can make all the difference.