Experience over Material

I did it. I finally grew up a few days ago. I put a ring on my beautiful fiancee wife’s finger, and I am officially a married man now. A husband to a girl that I fell in love with 11 years ago. I couldn’t be any happier, I finally grew up and became a man… A husband, a lover, a new set of responsibilities.

Before I dive too far into what my husbandly duties are, I want to tell you what the last few days were like. Before our wedding day, I had in-laws over during that weekend. My soon to be wife was in a cleaning frenzy. Bear in mind, we married in October and temperatures were starting to plummet so naturally drying laundry would have taken a while, so we left a tonne of to-be-done laundry in one corner of the room… and another corner of another room… and potentially another corner. We have a room of shame and it was half full of dirty laundry. We stuffed it in there with plans to do laundry after the wedding was over.

The wedding day came, we got a nice buffet in a nice pub, and went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant that night, that was a fantastic day.

A few days after the wedding, it suddenly dawned to me that it would take ages to do that laundry because it was both starting to get cold (autumn time) and the sheer amount of it (2 sets of super king sized fitted sheets and duvets, along with a mountain of clothes). In order for us to do that laundry, it would be spread out several days and take a lot more clothes horse or a lot of drying time to sort that out. Sidenote, I used to have 2 clothes horse, but my gigantic mountain lion-sized cat managed to claim it as a cat tree and it got bent and no longer stands up so that would have taken even longer to do this laundry.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to spend our wedding week off sorting through laundry. I thought it might be best to delegate this task to someone else. For ages and ages, I always did my own laundry unless it was something specific such as a dry clean only garment. I’ve never taken it to a launderette so I was in for a shock when I read there was such thing as a service wash. Basically, you drop it off to them and they will wash and dry the whole thing for you. I dropped it off at 11.40 am and got the whole lot back at 2.40pm the same day.

Now, why does this matter? During the wedding day, I was surrounded by my whole family eating food, drinking, and celebrating the union of 2 families as well as a journey of love. That was money very well spent.

I dropped my laundry off at a place, within a few hours got my laundry cleaned, dried, folded for me. That was the best £25 that I ever spent.

Why were those 2 things money well spent? Let’s take the simpler one first. The older I’ve got, the more I realise that time is too precious. I’d rather not waste time doing so much laundry that it takes me so much effort to get it sorted out. Truth be told, yes it would have taken me max 2 hours to do it, but it’s the effort of washing along with waiting for it to dry and doing it in a cost-effective way. That would have taken ages.

To put it in simple terms, I paid £25 to save time, electricity, energy, and effort.

Wedding day, I paid for the celebration, and the fact that it was a great time with family that has always been there for me and my wife: it made it even more special and worth it.

These 2 instances immediately were worth the money that I paid for them. I paid to save time and energy. I paid for celebrating love, family, and life. Both these instances were the best use of money, rather than spending on something that I would have got bored with after 2 days of taking it out of the box. I could have easily spent the £25 on something else and got bored of it, or spent what I spent on the wedding on a brand new iPad Pro (which got announced the day after my wedding), but it wouldn’t have meant anywhere near as much to me as spending my money how I did the week during my wedding.

Spending money on things that can make great memories and help save you time will be some of the greatest things you can ever spend your money on. You could pretty much argue that every material you have will bring you great memories - that £300 dress that you looked good in that one date night, the £40,000 car that looked great on the driveway and got the neighbours green with envy, and that £2000 TV that you watched the World Cup in 8K resolution up on your wall. I’m not disagreeing that those aren’t memories, they just have less meaning to me than the way I’d prefer to spend my money.

Instead of the dress, I’d rather enjoy a meal with a date in plain clothes and let the memories of the date do the talking. Big car? Unless that car was able to save me time (without me speeding), I’m happy holding onto my reliable Honda that gets me everywhere reliably and spending that money on saving me more time. £2000 for a TV? They all go down in price, and if I was a soccer fan, I’d have paid for a ticket to watch World Cup (which probably would have cost more than the TV once you factor in the travel costs). In the end, money being spent on great memories and saving time will have a more significant return on investment than buying material stuff that will probably keep your dopamine high for about 2 days and then die out. Spend wisely friends, for life is too short to care about what type of TV you had or what kind of car you drove. Life is all about having those types of special memories and making the most out of them.