One of the biggest threats to happiness at work is having too many fixed expenses at home. When you’re completely dependent on bringing home a pay check (or two!) every single month, you’re vulnerable. If work turns out to be unbearable you can’t simply up and leave and take three months without income.
I’ve chosen low-rent living for myself. At first it was through accident rather than planning but now I would never live any other way. Read on to see how it has made me happy at work – and in life.
Some years ago, my wonderful girlfriend Patricia and I were hunting for a new place to live in Copenhagen. We were living in her small, 1-bedroom apartment and we really longed for more space, more rooms and a bigger kitchen. Homes are getting ludicrously expensive in all European capitals including Copenhagen, so we went through a process that is common to many people hunting for a new home:
1. We started looking at places within our budget that we could easily afford.
2. But those places weren’t really cool so we started looking at more and more expensive places
3. Untill we’d reached our threshold of pain and were only considering the most expensive places we could conceivably afford
We actually submitted bids on two different (expensive) homes and narrowly lost out in each case to other bidders. Back then we were devastated – we really had our minds set on those two places. Today we’re incredibly relieved that it never came through. We’re still living in Patricia’s apartment which costs us next to nothing and looking back I can see how much of an advantage that has been for the both of us. Obviously this applies not only to your mortgage or rent but to all fixed expenses. Rent/mortgage just happens to be the largest fixed expense most of us have.
Leaving lots of breathing room in my economy has brought me some huge advantages:
