‘Life Design’ is something we’ve mentioned in a few posts now. But what do we mean? 

Since we started this journey, we have hugely improved our lives in a lot of different areas. This hasn’t happened by luck. It has been a process of research, planning and execution. As we like to say, we have learnt to CHALLENGE EVERYTHING!  

This whole process was kick started when Mr Way discovered the world of personal finance. The first step was reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. This started a money journey including property investment seminars, individual stock picking and (thankfully) finally discovering the FIRE world through Mr Money Mustache. 

Our general approach is to try and read/listen to different opinions on each subject from a wide range of resources. This lets us form our own judgement on what we think might work best for us. 

The ‘best’ way will obviously differ depending on your circumstances so we won’t be telling you how to design your life! We are just looking to share our experiences in the hope that is helps people re-evaluate their own situation. With Mr Way’s personal finance journey, he quickly learnt that neither property nor individual stocks were his thing and thankfully settled on index investing! 

There are so many aspects of people’s lives that they just carry out on auto-pilot without questioning. It’s easy to just follow the crowd and do ‘normal’ things like spending all of your income upgrading to bigger and better houses and cars, sitting in front of the TV all night or constantly fiddling on your phone. But these soon add up to have a huge impact on your finances, free time and overall happiness! 

Take a step back and look at the different ways people are approaching the aspect of life you’re interested in. Weigh up whether it would fit with the other aspects of your lifestyle and make you happier. Don’t be a sheep! 

Buying a House 

A huge factor in how you design your life is where you choose to live. This is valid whether you own or rent your accommodation. We won’t go into that debate here as that’s a whole different subject! 

When we were looking to buy a house back in 2014, our main criteria was the location. Not in the usual way of wanting to live in a sought after neighbourhood, but somewhere that worked for us. Some of the factors we considered were: 

• Near Mr Way’s office – see A Way to Less……. Cars! 

• General area – we didn’t want to live somewhere ‘posh’ but it was important to us to live somewhere we would feel safe and fit in. You don’t have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses if you don’t live near them! 

• Green spaces – this is important to us because we both feel much happier around nature. Living in a city can be overwhelming if you can’t even escape the busyness when you get home. Luckily our city is very green and we actually ended up living next door to a park! 

• Proximity to shops – this is important in our desire to use the car as little as possible. 

This goes above and beyond what most people would even think about when looking for a new house. Often people just go on the ‘feel’ of a place and compromise elsewhere. As we chose to buy rather than rent, we only wanted to commit to somewhere that was the perfect fit for our lifestyles! 

Healthy Body and Mind 

Being healthy is absolutely key to our approach to life. Physical and mental fitness are both intrinsically linked and looking after both is our top priority. After all, if you don’t look after yourself, you reduce your chances of even reaching FIRE! 

Our approach to physical fitness is described in this post. We’ve developed these fitness routines over the last few years and they really work for us. The key is in finding something you’re passionate about and genuinely enjoy doing. Otherwise, you are incredibly unlikely to stick to it!

For Mr Way, this is a combination of tennis and bodyweight fitness. For Miss Way, a combination of running, HIIT workouts, cycling and bodyweight fitness works best.

If you notice, all of these are very frugal ways of staying in shape with no expensive gym memberships in sight! 

From a mental fitness perspective, we take a more reactive approach. Sometimes we can go through long periods without struggling in this regard. Other times it needs constant attention. If we know we’re struggling to keep on top of things, we try to set aside more time for things like mindfulness and yoga.

An important thing to remember is that when you’re feeling down, you need to take a break. It usually feels like there’s so many things you MUST do NOW but it’s almost always more productive to just relax and revisit those tasks when you feel better. 

Daily Routine 

This leads on nicely to our daily routine. Exercise is a big part of this. We find that if we wait until after work, we’re usually too mentally fatigued to bother with a workout. So we fit it in when it suits us best, by getting up at 6am most days. This gives us an hour to fit in exercise before work.  

We also try to have a regular evening routine to improve our sleep quality. This involves no screens after 9pm, leaving an hour for reading/yoga/mindfulness etc before bed by 10pm. 

Again, we did a lot of research into circadian rhythms and sleep in order to learn the best ways to optimise these aspects of our lives. We went into this in a bit more detail in our post about sunshine. It will differ for each individual so you just have to experiment and find what works for you! 

Spending 

Over the last few years we have reduced our spending in almost every aspect. We go into some detail on this in our March Spending post. 

Media Consumption 

This category is very much a work in progress! We’ve seen numerous people point out the positive impact they’ve had when reducing their exposure to news/social media/TV etc. We’re on the way, but still have a lot to improve!

We have already seen a big improvement in the amount of free time we can use productively and hope this continues! It’s amazing how much time you can burn just scrolling through news/Facebook/TV channels etc. 

News  

We would love to follow the low news diet advocated by many others. Especially with all of the reporting around Brexit over the last few years, we have really started to realise just how over-dramatic and repetitive the news can be.

Most of the things that get reported are out of your control and worrying about them won’t help anyone! Brexit has been the main headline almost every day for the last few years. But how much of that ‘news’ do you actually need to know?  

Social Media 

Bored? Mindlessly scroll through Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc etc.  

That’s the default for so many people. It’s not healthy and can very quickly burn any free time, and any chance you had of relaxing. 

TV 

We don’t watch the Time Vaccuum (TV!) very much. When we do, it’s for our occasional favourites like Young Sheldon. We try to stick to comedy so that it genuinely makes us feel better!

Another favourite is New Lives in the Wild with Ben Fogle. This programme is really inspirational in giving us ideas for our FIRE plans! 

We know people who sit and watch TV all night after work, pretty much every night! To us, this seems a huge waste of time. We’re both working full time so our evenings are precious.

We actually find that being ‘into’ several TV shows at a time can be a real drag. You feel like you have to watch them and sacrifice more productive things to make sure you’re up to date! 

We find that if we sit down in front of the TV to wind down after work, before you know it the whole night has disappeared. We prefer to sit and unwind as soon as we get home, maybe with some music on. After that we start to be productive again, maybe cooking or DIY or even blogging! 

What’s Your System?

So that sums up some of the key categories we have given the ‘lifestyle design’ treatment! How about you? What aspects of your lifestyle have you designed to fit your goals? What still needs attention?  

“Reading this frustrates me slightly. Not because I don’t agree with it but because I sometimes find it difficult to achieve! Mr. Way is much better at this process than I am. I agree with the theory but putting it into practice is a different matter!

Miss Way