How to lose weight is like saving for retirement

After almost a year of counting calories, I eventually lost all the weight I've gained since my marriage. I can not help but think about the similarities of my weight loss journey and the savings process for retirement.

1. Having a big salary is not enough. To lose weight, you can either exercise, go on a diet or do both. And even though it's true that exercise alone can help you lose weight, you will not lose anything if you end up eating more than you burned during your workouts.

Before dieting, I focused solely on exercise. Even though it prevented me from being overweight, I still had difficulty reaching my weight goal.

When it comes to retirement, having a big salary is like doing exercise. Although a big salary allows you to spend more, you will have nothing for retirement if you spend everything you earn. In fact, you can even be worse if you improve your lifestyle faster than the size of your salary.

2. Sometimes it is easier to spend less than to earn more. The reason that exercise alone did not work for me was because I was totally against the idea of ​​exercising anymore. That's because I was already working four times a week, including Sundays where I traveled 16 to 17 kilometers to burn 1,000 more calories!

So, rather than doing more exercise, I had to eat less to reach my goal

If you already have a 72-hour work week, it's much easier to reduce your expenses than work harder to increase your retirement savings. In fact, working too hard can also have a negative impact, especially on your health.

3. You need less to save for a comfortable retirement if you start early. It took me some time to diet because I thought I needed to significantly reduce food. I've changed my diet and reduced my target weight loss to half a pound a week. This allowed me to consume another 1,500 calories (300 more calories per day) and reach my target weight.

Similarly, when it comes to saving, start early so that you can easily walk towards your financial goal. For example, if you start saving and investing P2000 per month at the age of 25, you will already have around 6.5 million pesos by the time you reach age 65, based on the age of 25. an annual compounded return of 8%. That's 575%. 100 more than the P960 000 that you will put aside over a period of 40 years.

If, on the other hand, you start saving and investing at age 45, even if you set aside 4%. month (which is also equivalent to 960,000 pesos in 20 years), you will have more than 3, 3 million to 65 years.

4. Track your expenses. One of the reasons my diet worked was because I downloaded an app that allowed me to track my calorie consumption. It helped me stay disciplined by watching what I ate. When I've already reached the upper limit of my allowance of 1500 calories a day, I skipped desserts and snacks or just ate something light for dinner. After a while, tracking what I ate also helped me make smart food choices.

Like calorie counting, spending tracking should also help you meet your savings and investment plan. Fortunately, there are now many free apps available to help you track your expenses. In fact, if you constantly spend everything you earn, tracking your expenses will help you identify areas where you can reduce your expenses without feeling deprived. Stick to a habit of living sparingly. Say, passing your craft coffee to the benefit of much cheaper options?

Tracking your expenses should also help you resist the temptation of buying unnecessary items, like another white shirt that you do not really need just because it was selling to 50 percent.

5. Stay disciplined. When I reached my target weight earlier this year, I decided to stop counting calories. However, one of my friends who also counts calories has discouraged me against that. He said that I still needed to keep track of what I was eating for the weight to remain stable.

By saving for retirement, it is also easy to back down and cancel any progress you have made if you lose discipline. below your means and systematically setting aside some of what you earn for investments. In fact, you should strive to keep your lifestyle constant and set aside more for investment every time you get a pay raise so you can increase your retirement savings faster. After all, realizing that you can take early retirement is much better than realizing that you need to retire later.

I hope my thoughts on the similarity between weight loss and saving for retirement will help you reach your retirement goals. If I were able to reach my goal weight (which I initially thought impossible), I'm sure you can reach your retirement goals if you stick to the discipline of spending below your means and put aside some of what you earn for investments.

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