In his books and podcast, Ramit Sethi encourages people to live their “rich life” by aligning their spending and saving with their values. This is a concept I find myself thinking about often and love talking about.

I love how the concept of a rich life can look completely different from person to person. At the same time, I find it to be very clarifying. For example, we live in a modest home that isn’t as big or as nice as I sometimes wished, especially compared to many people we know. But staying in our house allows us to have so many other things that are part of our rich life: owning our house in Eau Claire and spending our summers there, having healthy savings and retirements accounts, and for me to pursue work I really enjoy even if it doesn’t earn a full-time income.

It can be so easy to compare one small part of my life to someone else’s. But if I step back and take the rich life view, I feel centered and confident in the choices we are making and the tradeoffs that are part of them.

Thinking of a rich life reminds me of the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. It’s been a while since I read the book but I remember being inspired to make a list of the things I do give an F about and the things I don’t. I don’t care about things like: shoes, purses, trendy clothes, going to Disney…and the list goes on! Many things that I can be convinced I do care about if I pay too much attention to what other people care about (which social media is engineering to make you do!). Reminding myself that I don’t actually care about these things – that they aren’t part of my rich life – feels like a weight off.

Clearly I was thinking of living a rich life before Ramit wrote about the concept because I wrote a post years ago that I still think of: Our idea life. I love to look at this post and see how our life map’s onto those hopes from 2013. We are living so many aspects of the ideal life I imagined for us! This is so cool to see! It’s also so interesting to see how these aspects have manifest. For example, at the time I imagined we might eventually move houses or cities. So I thought “a kitchen we love to cook in” might be a more updated or beautiful kitchen. That’s not the case, but I do love cooking in our kitchen for how well it’s organized and functional for us and how we make so many meals for our family of five in it.

And: the sleeping through the night!! Hahaha and also sob for what past Kelsey and Chris were going through and the long way they still had to go. Our sleep journey was rough!

I’d love to update how we would describe our ideal life/rich life in a future post.

For now, I’m still brainstorming what might I would write for our ideal life today and looking towards the future. But I would love to hear what you think of the concept of a rich life. And, what helps you feel confident in their life you’re living and not comparing to other people?