Life = Organizing Resource Flows

     I have always easily understood money as a necessary resource flowing through my life, and my parents taught me to avoid debt, save, and keep a great credit score. In a limited scenario, this is a good strategy.  But life is actually not the limited scenario that I grew up thinking it was--thanks, Permaculture, for taking the blinders off!

    There are so many resources flowing through my life beyond money. All those great habits of saving, spending wisely, avoiding debt, and keeping a great credit score can be applied to every possible resource in my life, if only I have the wit to see what resources they are. Learning to see every day as an incredible flow of resources through my life is one of my unofficial resolutions for the new year.

    While homeschooling my young daughter, I think that teaching her to recognize and channel all of the many resource flows in her life will be one of the most useful things I can send her into the world with someday. Even children have resource flows through their lives. And they can learn to steward and shepherd their resources beneficially.

    In the last few days I've started keeping a detailed log of what I consume and what I produce each day. I want to move away from being merely a consumer, (even if what I consume I recycle!), and move towards ever more being a producer.  This log helps me to understand what I, in my lifestyle, particularly think of as resources, and the next step will be making better connections between where are those resources are to be found, and where/how the are used in my life.

    I've been blinded for so many years in McAmerican lifestyles, by over-valuing the resource flow of cash.   I expect it will take a lot of time and practice observing and harnessing the value of other things in my life. However, there is definitely excitement to it, as I am a rebel when it comes to toxic systems. And there is TONS of inspiration from learning how "The Greats" around here have done it.   With all of my innumerable resources I want to practice avoiding "debt", saving/stewarding the harvest, and keeping a great "connecting" score as I learn to plug in the various things I have to others' lives, and make use of excess streams in other lives.

Thanks for writing all that: I found it very interesting.

Like you, I have been a Gert for 30 years, and it really has paid off. At first it did not seem like it made much of a difference, living in a small house while others around me had bigger houses, but as time marched on, the exponential savings really started to kick in. Clean living helped, such as not smoking, drinking or doing any drugs. That saved a lot of money, but include a just plain minimalist lifestyle, and the savings just really started to add up.

But in realizing from a very early age the value of time, realizing every one of us have 24 hours in a day, and while some may game all hours of the day, what do they have to show for it? Myself, I want my time spent to have added value later whether it being in writing novels for a residual income in my retirement years, or tangible value produced today so I do not have to cut a check to get through life. Overall, I just think it is a combination of mindset and personality that has really paid off.

The only big difference for me is my views on having a great credit score. I kind of take pride in that mine is neither bad nor good; I just plain do not have one. In a weird way that is a very good thing. Since credit score is based on needing debt to establish a score, and I do not have a score, therefore I have no debt. About the only thing it negatively affects is my car insurance rating. I pay $264 every 6 months instead of $204 because of my lack of a credit score. But it is the only insurance cost I have, and since my car is paid for, all I have is liability insurance on it. So, as I said earlier, the savings becomes exponential. What I save in interest every year for not having a car loan, far exceeds the $120 I spend extra on car insurance. Overall, it is just very freeing because I have no credit score to fret over. Ever.

In that it becomes circular; the only way to financially win is to not play the game in the first place.

So thinking of resources like water, electricity, food, time? Or less tangible things like relationships and knowledge?
When I was in my 'real life' job and stuck in suburbia I used to do quite a bit of planning on paper of how a future life would look, and that included a few diagrams of resource flow - mostly money in exchange for 'X'. I'll see if I can dig any out - they may be amusing or useful to someone....
You do seem to do some "outside the box" thinking sometimes Rachel, thank you for giving me new directions!

Nancy Reading wrote:So thinking of resources like water, electricity, food, time? Or less tangible things like relationships and knowledge?

I started with all the tangibles, but yesterday I realized that "attention" is something of mine that other people want to use, and I might want to track that for my peace of mind. (Am very introverted, in other words!)

I want to figure out about qualifying time as a resource, too, but it's not exactly "mine" and it's certainly not renewable, so I haven't figured out how I want to track that dimension. I'm passing through time, not exactly "using" it.

Thinking about all this is helping me to "know myself," and I certainly hope Socrates would approve!

Rachel Lindsay wrote:

Nancy Reading wrote:So thinking of resources like water, electricity, food, time? Or less tangible things like relationships and knowledge?

I started with all the tangibles, but yesterday I realized that "attention" is something of mine that other people want to use, and I might want to track that for my peace of mind. (Am very introverted, in other words!)

I want to figure out about qualifying time as a resource, too, but it's not exactly "mine" and it's certainly not renewable, so I haven't figured out how I want to track that dimension. I'm passing through time, not exactly "using" it.

Thinking about all this is helping me to "know myself," and I certainly hope Socrates would approve!

You could easily track time using the four square system. Just divide a rectangle in half from left to right with a line down the center, then in the center centered top to bottom. This gives your four squares.

There is thus two answers from left to right: it hurts you or helps you. From top to bottom it helps others or hurts them.

Now quantify by those metrics what you do with your time. Let’s say you enjoy helping others, then serving a charity means you put that in the right upper box, doing something good and feeling good about yourself while doing it: a good use of time.

Gaming all night would be the right
Lower corner, it might feel good for you to do, but it’s hurting a partner by not spending it with them; a not so good use of time.

Helping someone else but neglecting your own homestead or partner: that would go up in the upper left corner. Not a super terrible waste of time, but you would be better served to do things in the right upper corner stuff instead.

And right lower: avoid time spent doing that because you are hurting others and yourself, say gambling at a casino for hours.

By breaking time into these four blocks you can see where you are really spending a lot of your time, and give it a worthiness rating. A person has to be honest with themselves of course but by focusing on things that help others, as well as yourself, it highlights the most important use of the 24 hours per day we ALL are granted

I hope this makes sense.

The acronym for life is: Living Intentionally for Excellence or it might stand for Living in Freedom Everlasting.

Another option might be  Living Independently for Everyone, so many reasonable options.

What does life mean to you?

Rachel said, "With all of my innumerable resources I want to practice avoiding "debt",  

Debt is the balancing between income vs expenses.

I figured out an acronym for debt:

DEBT = doing it, experiencing it, being aware of it, trouble

What does debt mean to you?

Anne Miller wrote:
I figured out an acronym for debt:

DEBT = doing it, experiencing it, being aware of it, trouble

What does debt mean to you?

Debt to me means Dependency, Enriching Banks Tremendously

I avoid financial debt at almost all costs because I look at my financial capital over the long term. So I see interest charges as firstly impoverishment of the consumer, and secondly as enrichment of a system so antithetical to my values that I do not want to contribute half of a cent to it in any way.

Debt in other forms of capital leads to greater or smaller levels of anxiety until I can manage to pay it back!

The only debt we have was for our land.

Even tough we had been financially debt free for many years and we had the money to pay cash though I had the interior of the house to finish. I am now able to pay that mortgage off if I so desire.

Good acronym.

Here we go - for what it's worth, this was my mind map for tangible process flows. It was how a future life might look and didn't include intangibles like relationships and time.