Agile Personal Development

What would you do if you knew that tomorrow (and every day after) you would get a big check to spend on whatever you wanted? I recently got to experience this through playing something called the Prosperity Game. Unfortunately for me, the checks weren’t real, but surprisingly I did learn quite a bit from the experience.

The Prosperity Game is an on-line application for helping you overcome what is called your financial “set point”. Your set point is an amount of money (in the real world) that you tend to have available to spend. This limits your experiences because you never think beyond your means. The idea behind the site is that by getting “simulated” checks each day and specifying what you will spend the money on, you will start to change your set point in real life. Each day the amount of the check increases, allowing you to buy something more expensive each day. I recommend using your Life List as a source of ideas for how to spend this “Prosperity” money.

Here is what I learned from the Prosperity Game experience:

1. There really is a ‘Set Point’ in your life. Although there is a lot of warm and fuzzy talk on the site about “energy” and personal “vibrations”, I found this tool to be helpful in determining your own financial set point. I’ve thought of this concept before, but never in the right context. For example, the amount of money you consider “expensive” changes as you get older. When you’re really young, a dime ($0.10) seems like a lot of money. Then as you get closer to around 8 years old, a dollar begins to be important. By the time you get to be a teenager, you’ll think hard about spending $10. While in college, $100 seems like an impossible amount to spend (unless you went to a fancy college where you spent $100 a week on top shelf liquor). After you get out of school, buying something for $1000 takes a lot of agonizing. By the time you’ve been working for awhile, and have bought a car ($10,000s), and a house ($100,000s), you have a different perspective on money. But there is still a certain level of spending for things that makes you cringe. You might not be sure what it is, but going through the Prosperity Game will help you find it. Afterwards, you may realize that there are things you *should* be buying now, but you aren’t because of this ’set point’.
2. There are distinct transitions of types of things to buy as money increases. At first, you start off with $100 a day. I could easily think of things to buy in this range. They were items that I’m right on the edge of buying now, but for some reason (my set point), I won’t usually buy them. This includes buying new “toys” like a new video game, hiking equipment, a year’s subscription to a magazine, new clothes for work, etc. As the checks increased to $5000 a day, I transitioned from buying “stuff” to buying more time to spend on fun things. For example, I decided to hire a yard service to mow my lawn for a year, freeing up my time. Soon after that, I started spending my checks on travel, buying new experiences. I started paying for vacations to the major locations I want to visit. As the value of the checks continued to increase to over $10K each day, I started to really travel extravagantly, buying first class tickets, staying in presidential suites, etc. This was great for awhile, but eventually I started thinking about how silly it was to be paying for all this travel. How could I possibly do this much travel when I don’t have enough vacation time?!? That was when I made the last transition - reducing time at work (and eventually to not working at all). Wow, that was some freedom. Knowing the check would come the next day, it was almost boring after awhile (note that I said *almost* boring - having unlimited money is still pretty cool). I could travel the world, not having to worry about working. I could visit friends and family for as long as I wanted to (or that they would let me). This was a big revelation to me, and gave me even more incentive to complete my life goal of achieving financial independence.
3. It is hard to know what things cost above your ‘Set Point’. Once I transitioned into the $5K a day range, I had a really hard time coming up with ideas of what to buy. I actually had to spend time every day researching the cost of different gadgets, or trips to far away lands. This was an eye opener for me. I found that my personal ’set point’ is somewhere in the $500-$1000 range. I really have little concept of what kind of things cost above that, like in the $4,000 to $12,000 range.
4. It is really useful to know how much money it will cost for everything on your Life List. There were many items on my life list that I want to do, but the amount of money required is prohibitive at this point. Putting a dollar value on each one of these goals was helpful in the ‘real world’. Previously, I had assumed that all my life goals would require the same amount of resources. After going through this exercise, I realized that I will need to set up a plan to save enough money to accomplish many of my life goals.
5. Not all important things in life can be bought. While it was great to be able to put some estimated costs onto my life list goals, I realized that many of them could not be purchased, even with all the money coming in. While some goals (e.g. spending more time with family and friends) could be better achieved if I had unlimited travel time and money, others weren’t really resource related (e.g. continually running faster than my 5K personal best time). These types of goals require a commitment of mental resources and time, not financial resources.

Overall, I encourage you to try out this method for finding your financial set point. You’ll find it changes how you see the world, good personal “vibrations and energy” or not. Leave me a comment about your experience. Or alternatively, let me know if you’ve experienced this (having unlimited money) for real. I’ve got some great ideas on how we can spend your money.