What if you had a budget of $200 for groceries each month and you spent $150 for that one month creating and planting your own large garden, complete with vegetables, fruits, beans, etc. You haven’t had a ton of experience with gardening, but you have done a lot of research and asked a lot of people about what works and what doesn’t. Because you spent so much money on getting plants, seed, etc. You aren’t able to buy many groceries and barely survive that month by living on rice and beans. You barely scrape by and aren’t able to buy anything besides the necessities, and even some of them you can hardly get.
If you did this, you might have a lot of people saying how dumb you were for spending so much on this stuff. That you should have looked to your needs before going after this expensive endeavor. However, what they might not realize is that in two or three months, with the right care and cultivation, you might be almost 100% sustained by this garden that you have invested in, and now when they’re all hurting on their grocery budgets, you have almost $200 a month to spend on other things.
This is just one of many examples of return on investment. Sometimes when people think of investment they think only of the Stock Market and that you have to be super smart to do any investing at all. The truth is, all of life is investing in something. Whether that be an education, family, career, skills, etc.
Today, I was reminded of this. That we must remember our opportunity cost or learning cost when thinking of investing, not just our monetary cost. Today, I subscribed to Libsyn, a hosting service for podcasting. In order to do the number of episodes a month that I am wanting to do, my subscription cost $15/month. To some, that may not be much, but for myself, I really had to ask myself what this investment was doing and was it worth it?
We so often get caught up in making that extra dollar that we totally disregard amazing opportunities that are presented to us. We start to fixate on the money and not on what things can be gained with the money.
Am I going to make $15 a month with my podcast? Highly unlikely. If nothing else, am I willing to pay $15 a month to have an excuse to talk to and learn some amazing things from people who are far more skilled than I am in certain areas? Even if that’s absolutely all I get from it, that’s still 100% worth it to me.
People pay $15/month for far stupider things than learning. So, I took the next step. And my first podcast episode is coming by the end of this week!
I’m so excited!