What’s Your Number?

We've got a personal question for you:

How much money do you need each month to live your optimal lifestyle?

If that felt a little personal, we don't actually expect you to send your answer to us (you're welcome to, of course!)...but it wasn't exactly rhetorical either. We'd love for YOU to know the answer to that question.

For us, the answer is around $14,000.

You can judge us if you'd like. You might think that's a lot, or you might think that's too little. But that's the number for us at the phase of life we're in. And remember...we have FOUR kids. That's A LOT of food, a lot of RESP’s, and a lot of activities.

So...what's your number?

Our guess is that you haven't thought much about it. You're likely familiar with how much you spend each month, but if asked, 'is that optimal?', you might not be able to answer that question.

When we contemplated starting a business, we needed to face this directly. We were both going 'all in' on something and didn't know whether we'd make it work. And by 'make it work', we mean generate any sort of income from it.

Both of us had always worked for companies, so we'd never earned our own revenue. And if you asked us the question, 'what's the optimal amount?', our answer would likely have simply been 'less than we earn'.

It's our experience that most people work this way.

The thing about asking the question and really digging into the numbers is that it surfaces how money gets spent, and generally, money follows interests. Either your own, or yours plus those in your household.

And, let's be honest, whatever your number is today, it's almost certainly been less before. The reality is that spending is kind of like 'stuff' we collect throughout our lives. We just accumulate more of it as time goes on, sometimes intentionally... but more often not.

As this happens, the earning needs to keep pace with the spending. It's easy to get stuck in what feels like a cycle, and it doesn't feel like there are many choices about it.

We've been there. We'll probably be there again at some point.

Returning to the original question, if you were to make an intentional choice about the lifestyle you want for the phase of life you're in, what would that amount be?

Greg wrote in our last blog post about something called 'encodings' from a new book by Jim Collins called 'What to Make of a Life'. The book is the result of over a decade spent researching what made the lives of some of the most accomplished people in history 'great'. Another concept Jim's research uncovered is something he coined 'flipping the arrow of money'. This insight came from looking at the role economics played in each person's rise to excellence in their respective area of focus.

The result was surprising… but it also wasn't. Can you guess the role economics played in some of the greatest human lives on record?

None whatsoever.

There were zero cases in Collins' research where the pursuit of their craft (ranging from political movements to book authoring to musicians) was connected to a desire to achieve economic success. Rather, the opposite was true.

The framing of economics for every person in the study was this: 'How much do I need to make in order to be able to keep doing the work I love?' That is reframing the question of economics to be one where money is an enabler to do the thing you love. This is 'flipping the arrow of money'.

After over 15 years each spent building our "careers", neither of us had asked ourselves this question in this way about our work. It was often more like this: "How much MORE money can I make in order to justify continuing to do this?"

But now the arrow for us has been flipped. While $14,000 represents the number that allows us flexibility to do things we need to do around the house, enjoy a meal or two out, and sign the kids up for activities, we've also done the math and know this could be a lot lower.

The question we've now asked ourselves is this: What do we need to be able to keep doing this work? We've figured that if we needed to, we could get it down to about $8,000 a month. If we must... we can get there. And if needed, we absolutely would.

Raising this question for the first time was about opening a door to a whole new set of experiences that would become Vienna Waits. When we did, we made changes like getting rid of a car lease and buying a smaller car, taking our younger kids out of before and after school care, and putting some limits on activities to be replaced with more quality family time. We got to a baseline we were comfortable with, and also a place that we actually wanted to be.

This became our number: what we'd need in order to keep doing what we loved. And now we patch it together each month to make things work. It's not a conventional salary... but we find a way.

We did this planning before Collins' book came out. The foresight was lucky on our part, and with his research to back it up, we can now officially recommend it as a practice.

If Jim Collins says it's a good idea, who the hell are we to argue?!

So let's bring it back. What's your number?

If you've never sat down to figure it out, here's how to start:

• List what you actually spend - not what you think you spend. Pull the last three months of bank and credit card statements and sort them into categories. The patterns will surprise you.

• Separate the non-negotiables from the nice-to-haves - some expenses are fixed and intentional, others just accumulated. Ask yourself honestly which ones you'd miss if they were gone, and which ones you wouldn't.

• Build your floor, then your ceiling - what's the minimum you'd need to live a life you're okay with? And what does 'optimal' look like on top of that? Knowing both numbers gives you a range to work within.

Once you know what your number is, everything gets a little clearer. The work you choose, the opportunities you say yes to, the ones you don't. They all start to make more sense when you know what you're actually working toward.