#9 Financial Literacy Guided by Spare Time

About three weeks after leaving my job, my physical condition had settled down quite a bit.
I spend my days doing housework and steadily decluttering.
Living every day with plenty of space in both my time and my surroundings, I started to become curious about ' that'.

It's 'money'.

It's not that it's a vulgar topic, but I've lived my life until now without really worrying about my income. It wasn't that much, but I thought, I'm frugal and thrifty, so there's no way I'm overspending, and since my household budget isn't in the red, there's no problem, I told myself.
But now, with no income, I've started to wonder how I'm going to earn money from here on out and what my current household budget looks like. The 'what about money' problem sprouted in the spare time that suddenly fell into my lap. Inspired by a book on money introduced on a psychology YouTube channel I had been watching, I started watching money-related channels on YouTube while doing my morning chores.

The channel I'm watching is the Libe-Dai channel.
To summarize it very roughly, it's a channel that teaches you how to increase your money using IT as a weapon.
We in our 40s are the employment ice age generation, and I think many of us have inherited the values of our parents' generation: 'lifetime employment, work diligently, receive money for the work you do, and save the money you receive'.
I, too, have lacked financial literacy until now, and I've let the busyness of raising children and working keep me from taking any particular action until today.
I don't 100% agree with the philosophy of this channel, but it was full of fresh ideas for my Showa-born analog brain!

The 'I'm just scared of risk' crowd

What shocked me the most was the idea that 'cash loses to the risk of rising prices'.
It's common among middle-aged and older people, but because I'm more afraid of risk than anything else, I don't touch stocks or investment trusts that have the risk of losing principal, and I believe that savings are the best (that's me). It's true that savings won't lose a single yen of principal, but the value of the currency decreases with inflation. You can't buy a Umaibo with the 10 yen you deposited 20 years ago, you can't buy a stamp with 60 yen, you can't buy an egg with 100 yen—even if small things aren't much of a problem, you can't go study abroad with 1 million yen, or buy a condo with 40 million yen. With the recent rush of price hikes, we've really started to feel inflation on our skin, haven't we?
This made me start to feel that being afraid of risk and maintaining the status quo is actually quite a risk.... If my explanation is hard to understand, please do watch the video.

Today is the youngest day of your life!

It's a cliché observation, but when you're learning about money, there are so many things you'll think, 'I wish I had known this 20 years ago!' But the line that appears at the end of the video, 'Today is the youngest day of your life!', grandly resolves all the foreshadowing (laughs).
And it's precisely because I quit my job that I encountered this channel now; it might not have resonated with me 20 years ago.

To save money, first become minimal

Also, another thing that hit home was that to create an environment for saving, you should first declutter your finances and become minimal.
I can't disclose information from within the paid community, but in light of the goal of 'living minimally', I plan to summarize what I have acquired and what I have let go of with reference to this site in my next article.

Thank you for reading again this time.
I am updating irregularly about what I have been doing during the 100 days that opened up after I let go of my job.
It would be a great encouragement if you could 'like' and follow me.