To Heinz or Not to Heinz

We’ve all heard the excellent advice to pay yourself first.
But maybe my prescription is to literally pay yourself first — the self that just wants to enjoy life as it is now.

Maybe the prescription here is to spend 5% of your income purely on things that make you feel good.

Because if you are not enjoying the building today, the tomorrow you create will carry the same flavour.

When I was recently asked what financial practice I most wanted to encourage to help people become free from accounting for every moment by cost — forever measuring life through financial benefit rather than truly living this one precious existence — I was at a loss.

Truthfully, I was having one of my less green-light days.
A low mood.
A self-pitying wobble.

Eventually, I surrendered to it and went on a laptop-and-Word-document rampage about the universal love powering through everything.

This abstract little spiral brought me back to the love within myself, and I realised that was what I’d really been missing.

And then the insight came to me, in a thoroughly non-academic fashion:

I point clients back to love.

To why we are creating in the first place.
To why we work.
To why we save.

Apparently, love is not considered an objective financial prescription.
It’s also quite difficult to study academically.

In fact, it’s almost the complete opposite of everything I first encountered entering the financial industry.

I remember sitting in a client’s home with an adviser thirty years deeper into the profession, eager to learn how we empower people with financial tools to create freedom and independence.

The first words out of the client’s mouth were:

“You’re not going to tell me to stop buying Heinz baked beans again, are you?”

And honestly… where is the benefit in cutting out the tiny things that bring us joy just to save 12p?

Maybe allowing ourselves to spend on the things that genuinely delight us actually satisfies us more deeply.

It’s like eating your favourite meal with all the flavour and fat removed — there’s no satiety in artificial solutions sold in the hope of future health.

Taking the elevator to the gym is another perfect human metaphor for the strange artificial solutions we create to solve man-made problems.

We make conditions the problem:

I must improve my weight.
I must improve my career.
I must improve my income and pension.

When perhaps it’s far simpler to allow.
From love.

I’d love to improve my health.
I’d love to get the promotion.
I’d love to save towards the most delicious retirement imaginable.

In the words of Emmet Fox- ‘There is no door that enough love will not open.’

Allow.
Allow.
Allow.

Give more of yourself to the things you choose.
Create the conditions for your ideal life from the love of doing so — not from guilt-induced restriction, which we so easily default to.

Give yourself permission to spend on joy.
Now.

Thank yourself for all your hard work building your savings and paying for your life.

Know that your being comes before your doing.

So allow, my treasures.
See your majesty.
Know that enough can be perfect.

And eat them flipping Heinz baked beans!!