Learning How To Be Content With What You Have

The trend in our culture is to buy bigger and buy more, often to impress our family, friends, or strangers idling next to us at red lights. We may also want to give our kids the childhoods we wish we’d had. We take curated pictures of our lives and display them on social media, but these snippets are often only a sliver of the story. Few people take to Facebook to admit they are drowning in debt and don’t sleep well at night. Instead, they post pictures of dozens of financed presents under their Christmas tree. We hope to help break this cycle and mindset that keeps people broke. Contentment is a superpower to help you be successful in your personal finances. Since I’m human and as flawed as Jane and John Jones, I set a New Year’s Resolution this year to enjoy what I already owned. Throughout the past year, I learned how to be content with what I have. Here are my insights from the journey.

Being content is being happy and satisfied with your life or your current situation.
Learning how to be content ripples into your personal finances, relationships, overall outlook on life, goals and habits, and career.
By halting your spending and instead shopping at home in what you already own, you can not only save money but find new joy in old items that you have underutilized
Learning how to be content with what you have isn’t a quick one-step process, so practice patience and grace with yourself as you learn to realign your life to find greater contentment

What Is Contentment?

Contentment is a state of satisfaction and happiness with your life. This can include feeling happy and satisfied with your possessions, situation, or status. Contentment can help you align your life and decisions with what matters most to you by focusing on what brings you joy and satisfaction instead of trying to find fulfillment in buying more stuff.

Since contentment is a state of wellbeing, people may not always correlate it with money, but by knowing what makes you content and aligning your budget and your spending on those aspects of life, you can trim your expenses and focus your savings, bringing you more satisfaction with your life and your money.

When you aren’t content, you may find yourself constantly chasing the feeling. Throwing money after objects in an attempt to buy happiness rarely works. But finding contentment in what you already own can accelerate your journey along the FIRE ladder to financial freedom.

Learning how to be content has more ripples in life than just with money. Contentment can also improve your:

Habits
Relationships
Outlook on life
Understanding of your goals
Satisfaction and performance at work

How My Journey to Contentment Started

If you’ve been around The Budget Brigade block for a minute, you know that I’m a bibliophile. I LOVE books. My 1,100 square foot home, however, isn’t as much of a diehard lover of space consuming hardcover novels. My latest trip to IKEA left me struggling to orient the newest KALLAX shelf unit to fit in our bedroom without blocking the window.

About half an hour into the project, I realized I was running out of room to house my reading addiction. Not only that, but as I reorganized my books on the shelves, I noted I was buying new books faster than reading the ones I owned.

Coupled with the vast selection of new release titles I checked out from the local library, even my 100+ books a year reading track record wasn’t making a dent in my collection.

After sweating and swearing, trying to cram my newest shelf into the bedroom, then dusting all the untouched books waiting to be read, I reached my limit.

So I set a boundary with myself, much to my husband’s relief.

No more bookcases. If I wanted to buy more books, I had to follow a one-in, one-out method. Meaning for every book I bought, I needed to sell or donate a different one to make space.

Then I took my resolve a step further.

In the last week of December, I tied my new rule into my New Year’s Resolutions. For the next year, I would enjoy what I already owned.

Dozens of the books on my bookcase had been sitting there for years, waiting to be read. How lonely they must be. Ditto to my vast CD collection, which got pushed aside with our Amazon Prime benefits.

Instead of spending money on more books and aggravating my dust allergy, I would read the books I owned and thin out the ones that I didn’t enjoy and wouldn’t read again. I hoped to stop buying books I’m uncertain I’ll enjoy by prioritizing purchasing the ones I’ve read and loved. But growth is a process, one rung up the ladder at a time.

How I Learned to Be Content With What I Have

The method to the madness seems a little silly in hindsight given its complexity, but the amazing thing about contentment is that it’s often closer than we think. We just have to be willing to embrace it and shut down the noise nudging us toward the wrong path. The steps below helped guide my journey to contentment. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

1. Stop purchasing new stuff and focus on what you already own

We didn’t change our entertainment budget to zero, but for the year, we focused on buying experiences that aligned with our goals, hobbies, and aspirations instead of buying stuff. Except for video games. My husband was 100% on board with me not buying more books, but he didn’t want to join me when it came to his gaming. Maybe one day!

2. Shop at your house

Whenever I got the urge to go buy a new book, I sat on the floor in front of my bookshelves and went shopping in my personal library instead. I selected three or four books I hadn’t read yet and assessed the jacket synopses to figure out which one I wanted to read. The good and somewhat staggering thing about having a massive amount of books I’ve never read is that I could shop from my collection and still enjoy a novel experience.

This holds true not just for books. You can find contentment in a lot of different things you already have but underutilize. Other examples include:

Clothing: shirts, pants, shoes
Accessories: jewelry, purses
Personal care: makeup, shampoos, body washes, lotions
Household goods: towels, linens, candles
Entertainment: board games, video games, kids’ toys, movies, music

3. Ease into the process

Given my book obsession, I knew cold turkey was the fastest route to falling off the wagon and rolling into a bookstore with my credit card in hand.

To give myself a higher chance of success, I started my year of enjoying what I owned with a ween off period. For January and early February, I allowed myself to venture into the public library still. I also made one or two trips to Books-a-Million before the budgeting shutdown on books.

I’ll confess, knowing that I would not be buying books for the rest of the year meant I overspent on the front end. Now that I’ve gone through the process, I would set a stricter limit for my initial ramp down to zero, while still allowing myself an off ramp with a slow down speed before slamming the brakes to a full stop.

4. Get an accountability buddy

Giving up buying books for a year wasn’t easy. It wasn’t even somewhat difficult. It was downright HARD, especially since I’m an aspiring author. I’d justified my collection of novels as business expenses. These books were research for the dozens of future novels I’d draft.

I’d made stories in my head justifying my overspending.

Why did I need to keep buying books when I hadn’t read the ones I owned?

Why, I’ll retire someday! I’ll have soooo much time on my hands. I’ll need things to read. What if the library gets nuked in the next world war? What if there’s a tree famine and they can’t print any more books? Just get ebooks? How dare you suggest such a thing!

I knew sticking to this resolution was going to be hard, so I enlisted not just one but two accountability buddies: my husband and my work wife. I tasked my husband with dragging me kicking and screaming out of Books-a-Million if I so much as tossed a suggestive glance at the clearance section. I told my work wife in no uncertain terms to throw the biggest highlighter at her desk straight for my noggin if I mentioned I bought a book.

I did a lot of personal growth through therapy the same year. I’m a bit of a therapy shopper and books are my comfort spend. After one particularly difficult therapy assignment, I told my husband I’d earned a trip to the bookstore. Walking among the familiar shelves of Books-a-Million instantly lowered my heart rate. While I cringed at the sight of how inflation continued to hit my bargain books, I still found several interesting books under $6. I grabbed a bunch and put quite a few back.

Then I walked up to my husband, a stack of books cradled between my arms, and declared I was done.

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I thought you weren’t going to buy anymore books?”

While I’d rationalized the trip to the bookstore, that was different than deserving to buy books, which would break my promise both to myself and to my husband.

It hurt to put those books back on the shelves, but I knew it was the right decision. If I still wanted them the following year, I could always buy them then.

5. Practice patience and grace with yourself as you learn how to be content

Did I successfully make it through the entire year without buying a single new book or reading any I didn’t physically own?

No I did not.

But I bought a lot less than I would have if I hadn’t made this resolution, even with my January binge. And when I found myself browsing the library’s digital catalog on Overdrive, I prioritized looking for audiobooks of the physical books lining my shelves so that I was still consuming the stories I owned.

6. Learn to reframe and refocus your goals and desires

During my year of enjoying what I already owned, my family and friends gifted me subscriptions to Scribd, which did not help squash my reading addiction.

When I started my resolution, I was hellbent on focusing on the books in my house. While working on my current manuscript in progress that I hoped to publish and while ramping up my vision for The Budget Brigade, I wanted to expand my reading scope to research for these projects. Unfortunately, I was writing in a genre where I’d read the vast majority of the comps for my WIP and I only owned a few personal finance books.

During the year, I reframed my goal to include Scribd and the library. After all, I concluded, I already owned a subscription to Scribd and paid taxes to use the library’s resources. I wasn’t going out to Audible or buying these books on Amazon. I was using a service I already had.

By allowing myself to include the Scribd library, I found even greater contentment in my options of reading material while still keeping to the heart of my goal.

7. Cleave from your life what doesn’t bring you joy to help find contentment

Channel your inner Marie Kondo here. Find what sparks joy in your life and let it surround you. If something does not spark joy, thank it for its contribution and let it go live its best life where it will be better appreciated and fulfilled.

Luckily for me, I own Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy and thus could reread them along my year-long journey. They helped me remember the importance of letting go that which didn’t serve me and didn’t help me on my path to contentment.

We’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover. Some books shouldn’t be judged by their three paragraph synopsis either. Purchasing books I hadn’t read before inevitably led to having some duds in my collection.

When I came across such books, my year of learning to enjoy what I owned helped me donate them. Not only was I freeing up the potential to bring better contentment into my life from books I’d enjoy more, but I was giving someone else the opportunity to fall in love with the books that weren’t my cup of tea. Just because they didn’t spark joy for me didn’t mean they wouldn’t spark joy for someone else. I found joy—half of the components of contentment—in helping these books on their journey to a better life.

8. Stay away from the comparison game

Do you know what makes it really hard to stay in the contentment game? Social media.

While Goodreads is a great tool to help me find recommendations for next reads, it’s not a great motivator to stick with what I already have.

Social media shifts our focus from what we have to what we’re missing. It gives us so many ideas about what we could buy and what we might want. Instead of helping us find contentment, social media throws us into the deep end of the comparison pool. When you’re focused on comparing yourself to what others have or what life could look like if only you had that one more book, contentment gets further and further away.

During my year of enjoying what I owned, I deleted social media apps from my phone. This forced me to pull the sites up in my browser. Since I’m lazy and the sites are janky on mobile view, this was a fairly good deterrent. I turned off the saved password and remember my user name features for Goodreads on my phone and computer. I also put stop gaps in place to help protect myself from the siren call of Facebook, Instagram, and the artist formerly known as Twitter.

With contentment, the goal is to focus inward in order to fuel positivity in what you have instead of disappointment in what you don’t have. To enjoy what I had, I had to focus on my current collection instead of building my never-ending To Be Read list.

Learning How to Be Content Paid Multiple Dividends

In my year of enjoying what I already owned, I addressed more than my book problem. While books were the driving force for my resolution, they weren’t the only items I found joy in throughout the year. By staying out of Bath and Body Works, I finally made a dent in my collection of body washes, soaps, lotions, and candles cluttering up my bathroom cabinet and linen closet.

Below, I list other examples of some things I enjoyed that helped bring contentment to my life. For the love of the Holy Grail, please don’t read through them all one by one, unless you are really bored. The point from listing them is to show how many things I’d already spent my hard-earned money on that I didn’t fully appreciate because of the sheer excess of options.

Books I Loved That I Hadn’t Read

Music I Loved That I Hadn’t Listened to In Forever

Movies We Enjoyed For the First or Fifth Time

21
Burn After Reading
Creed
Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution
Fargo
Free Guy
Gone Girl
Halloween
The Martian
Moneyball

TV Shows We Enjoyed For the First or Fifth Time

The Expanse
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
FRIENDS
Friday Night Lights
iZombie
J.A.G.
Key & Peele
Vikings

How To Be Content With Spending Less

So many people assume by being frugal, you’ve given up on enjoying life. I disagree. There is plenty of contentment to be found in frugal fun and in what you already own but have neglected.

Spending less brought me more contentment with my FIRE goals too and put me on a better path toward our FIRE freedom. The less I spent on crap I didn’t use—much less need—the more we had available to save for our dream of moving out west. Just the thought of eventually getting a white Christmas brings me contentment with my decision to spend less and save more.

While I eventually loosened the reins on my “nothing new” resolve over the year, my resolution helped me focus with new intentionality. Knowing I had plenty I could already enjoy, we had no qualms getting rid of Amazon Prime and Netflix. If I needed to take a break from listening to BT on endless repeat for a day, I listened to ads on Spotify instead of paying for a pricey subscription.

How to Be Content With Your Situation

You’re likely not a bookworm like me. (If you are and ever want to talk books, I’m always down to nerd out over plot and character arcs,. Hit me up in the comments below.) Most of us, however, can find contentment by reassessing what we own and what we buy, whether it’s books or one of the many other categories listed above.

Spend some time considering what brings you the most happiness and satisfaction in your life. These are your key areas to focus on in order to build more contentment with what you have. What did you come up with? Share your insights in the comments below.

Struggling to find contentment with what you have or need support as you journey toward a life of better contentment? Drop us a line in our budgeting and personal finances Facebook group for support and ideas!