Last night my wife and I had a very interesting conversation. Before I dive in, however, it would be most helpful to offer a little context.
The work I do in the financial sector includes focusing on one big mindset shift: accumulation to cash flow. We in America have been cultivated to have an accumulation mindset. For example: save money in a 401k for 40 years so you can have a big pile of money when you retire and you can live off the interest!
If you're willing, do a little thought experiment with me that I learned from Chris Miles. Close your eyes... eh, actually, no, that won't work. :) Pretend you're closing your eyes! Think about how much you make each month -- what is your monthly take home income? Envision that for a moment. Doing some quick, doesn't-need-to-be-exact mental math, divide it by two and how much is that?
Imagine now, that that amount, half your income, was taken away. For whatever purpose, you were forced to work part time or who knows... but you now have only half your income. How do you feel? What is coming up for you?
Okay, no need to dwell there very long! Let's come back to what you make currently. Take a breath... whew! Now consider this -- that amount that is half your income, imagine that amount being added again to what you currently make. So if you currently make 3,000 per month, imagine if you were making 4,500 a month. How do you feel? What is coming up for you?
Notice that I never said "you have a million dollars in the bank!" The amount of money you have accumulated matters little*. It's because cash flow is more important than accumulation. If that cash flow is passive, it can be duly called retirement.
*Please note, I'm not saying that having some savings is bad; putting money aside for a rainy day is a crucial principle of good financial management. What I'm saying is that cash flow is a similarly crucial principle that is too often overlooked, as I will explain next.
There are significant flaws in our "save in a 401k for 40 years" system as most any baby boomer will tell you. If you do the numbers, especially if you include inflation in the works, you will have to take a significant financial hit when you're ready to retire. In 2010, two out of three 65 year olds were relying on Social Security for half their income! Two Thirds!! And what's worse, one third of 65 year olds were relying on it for 90% of their income! I call this a retirement into poverty. ...it's that or Walmart! (Note: these stats are from the 2010 census.)
Now imagine if, instead of a large sum of cash that you hope you don't outlive, you had a passive income of seven or eight thousand dollars coming in each month like clock work. See a difference?
We seem to think that accumulation creates cash flow which allows us to live the life we want. In reality, that's backwards. By focusing on developing ourselves and building our cash flow, be it through business and/or investments, accumulation becomes the natural side effect.
Okay, great... so what on earth does this have to do with housework???
Well, Bonnie was sharing with me last night about how she's been making changes in her mindset about housework. It's been a source of constant pain -- no matter what she cleans, it is quickly undone. When a room does get clean, she sometime goes all Nazi on anyone who tries to set one thing down in it! You can imagine how well that works having 5 kids (4 littles and one... husband).
She often feels frustrated because the house will never get completely clean all at the same moment ever. And if by some miracle it does, then the moment kids wake up, it's all over. It just won't last.
She's been working hard on improving her mindset about these things because, quite frankly, that's not a fun world to live in! She doesn't want it! Who would?!
In doing so, she's becoming more and more healthy about housecleaning and lately it's actually not been getting as dirty. She's doing quite an impressive job. As she was telling me about this last night, the relationship with my comments above occurred to me. I told her: "Bonnie, it seems like with housecleaning, you've been having an accumulation mindset rather than a cash flow mindset."
She made a face, it's true, but not one of "what the what?" It was more one of "Oooh, interesting!" We explored it a little more and here's what that basically means.
She was trying to get the house all, 100%, completely clean, all at the same moment. Why? For the sake of calling it done! Well, that's a bit like accumulation -- you want to hit some magic number so you can be done working! Money doesn't quite work like that as mentioned above. Neither does housework.
It's not an issue of accumulation, it's an issue of flow. In a family of six and growing (no, that's not an announcement), it is unrealistic to think you can stop entropy from happening! However, what Bonnie realized is that, the shorter the period between cleaning a given room, the less work it is to clean. Again, it's an issue of flow.
As we improve our ability to create an organized and deliberate flow of house cleaning, the cleaner the house will be overall, and it doesn't matter if the whole house is clean or not, because that's not the goal anyway. The goal is a better flow.
The best flow, of course, is for everyone to continually pick up after him/her-self. That's a great ideal, but sometimes it's tricky to be good at as adults, let alone our children! Still, little by little we can at least improve.
Thinking of housecleaning from a perspective of flow rather than accumulation is much, much more kind to our mental health, just as thinking of retirement from a perspective of passive cash flow is much more kind to our financial health.
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