Exercise vs Budgeting: A Simple Analogy

I want to write a quick note about lifting. This is not my field of expertise, but as an avid weight lifter and researcher, I can tell you there are similarities between exercise and the ways you utilize your money.

There are two primary forms of exercise: Lifting, and cardio.

There are two methods of utilizing money: Spending, and investing.

For the purposes of this article, we will not be going into the details of paying bills or rent. This is a comparison of what to do with disposable income.

When you lift weights with the purpose of getting stronger:

• The body builds muscle.
• The muscle adds on dense weight to the body.
• Metabolic rate of muscle is higher, therefore the body's metabolism increases long term.
• The benefits are not reaped short term, you will see it overtime.

Performing cardio exercises for the purpose of burning calories:

• The body burns calories, typically leading to a loss of fat.
• The benefits are generally for the short term results, the results will not last long unless your diet allows for maintenance.

If you consider yourself a financial expert, maybe you can relate these points to money!

How well do you invest your disposable income? or do you spend it?

By investing your funds into income producing assets, you are creating dividends for yourself long term. For example, when you buy a share of Coke stock for $60, there may not be any sense of joy right away, but how do you feel after your first quarterly dividend of $0.46? Still fairly empty, right? But years down the line, that quarterly dividend adds up, especially if you keep buying shares. You just don't recognize it immediately.

What if you took that same $60 and treated yourself to a nice dinner? It would be satisfying when you order and when enjoying the meal. But once that dinner experience is over, all you have left over is the memory. There is nothing to gain from it thereafter.

As you can see, investing money strongly relates to lifting weights to build muscle. Performing cardio exercises strongly relates to spending money on items and experiences.

Just some food for thought. Please let me know what you think.

For the purposes of this article, I chose to keep things simple. Want to make things complicated? Let's quickly talk about savings instead of spending.

When it comes to cardio, instead of comparing to spending, you may also compare to saving money. Cardio is an exercise to lose weight, to burn the calories. Similarly, you can take your money and fund a savings account. You will see the growth as you continually fund the savings, but the savings account will not build turn into an asset that works for itself.

Well... Perhaps you can perform high intensity interval training (HIIT), that can correlate to a high yield savings account :D

Kickboxing is a great HIIT workout!

The convoluted analogies can go even further with debt, and high risk investing:

Debt:

• getting in debt to fund your lifestyle (horrendous credit card debt), compare this to a junk food diet.
• getting into debt to invest in income producing assets, compare this to carbo loading like what many do prepare for an athletic event like the marathon.

High risk investing:

• Buying assets that are highly speculative like NFTs or crypto, compare that to lifting weights without proper form, or not supplementing with enough protein.

I am not enough of an expert in these fields to go into further detail, perhaps someone else reading this can fill in the blanks.

I hope you found this article insightful.

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