How Minimalism Made Me Rich & Changed My Life

Becoming a minimalist has reduced my stress about saving money. As an extremely frugal person, this is always a big plus. Saving money happens almost naturally when you are a minimalist. 

Everybody’s road to minimalism is different. Some start minimalist living to simplify their life, free up more time, or have a cleaner space. Some are motivated by a need to stop buying as much stuff and stop being as consumeristic. Everybody’s journey is different.

For me, one of the main benefits that I've just started to realize recently is that living minimally has freed up a lot of time in my life. Now I can spend more time creating videos and living a life that I don't need an escape from.

I no longer spend all week waiting for the weekends because I enjoy every single day. This is a privilege that very few people have.

People are always saying that time is our most valuable asset, yet almost nobody treats it that way. Instead, we waste hours a day on our phones, watching TV, and looking at screens. We're very seldom actually present in the moment enjoying what we're doing. 

We're constantly thinking about the past, something that happened to us, something that we wish we could change, reliving that memory. If we’re not looking back, we’re looking forward to the future, which is just imagined. It's not real.

I used to try to escape from the present moment. We escape in our minds to get closer to the weekend, to get closer to being off work, or doing anything else besides what we're doing right now. This is where some core principles have come in and allowed me to no longer need that escape.

One of these principles is spending less. I buy almost nothing besides basic necessities like food, clothes, and other things that simplify my life. This allows me to spend a lot more on experiences.

We're in Costa Rica right now. This is an experience that I'm happy to spend money on because I saved on all those other things. Minimalist living has enabled me to do this type of thing and I’m so grateful. 

Only spending money on the things that really matter frees up a lot of other areas in my life. Because I spend less, I have the ability to actually earn more. With my expenses being so low, I had the opportunity to leave my day job where I was kind of capped at how much I could make.

Needing less money provided me with the opportunity to do more creative work. I was only making a couple of hundred dollars a month when I quit my job and started doing YouTube.

But because I didn't need that much money, I was able to take that opportunity where most other people couldn't. When someone’s living paycheck to paycheck and need every cent they earn, they miss out on other opportunities.

When you spend less, you have to work less, which is really something that I'm super passionate about. I love that spending less gives me a chance to work less. It's just really laziness on my part, I think.

Another principle of minimalism that I appreciate has been saying no to everything that I possibly can. I used to have this compulsion, which I think a lot of us have, to say ‘yes’ as my default. If somebody asks you to go to dinner, you automatically feel like you should do it.

If you have a new opportunity that comes up, you feel like you should take it, even if it's not a great opportunity.

I did this over and over during the years when I was working four different jobs because it was so hard to say no to money. I realized I had no freedom and no time to do what I wanted to do.

Since then, I have started to almost ruthlessly say no to everything that I possibly can. I have maybe taken it a little bit too extreme at this point, but I have been able to build this freedom into my life. I think very few people have the freedom to be able to do what they love every single day.

The only way I was able to get this freedom was by changing what I was doing with my free time. Instead of checking my phone for hours every single day, watching a ton of TV, and wasting my time with other random activities, I was using my nights, weekends, and my free time to build a life that I didn't need an escape from.

What you do in your downtime will drastically change how the rest of your life is going to go. At least it did for me.

If I hadn't taken those two to three years of really sacrificing, but also trying a bunch of new things and building businesses and different streams of income, then I never would have built this kind of freedom and this ability to do very few things.

The things I actually do are super important and I do them very efficiently. For me, it all comes back to this idea of ‘less but better.’ This is the main idea behind essentialism and minimalism. I apply that to every area of my life as much as I possibly can.

How minimalism made me rich

I hope this article inspires you to try living a more minimalist lifestyle. I did not realize how minimalist living would lead to having more money, and more free time. It has made it so much easier for me to stay present and enjoy life.