If you received $1,000 today, $2,000 tomorrow, and an ever-increasing amount every day for the next 30 days, what would you spend it on?
In this episode, Part 2 in my 2-part series, I share my experience playing The Prosperity Game. Yes, over the next 30 days, I'm going to imaginarily spend $465,000.
Yesterday, in Part 1, I spoke about the mechanics of how to play this game, including:
- What you need to know to begin
- How to track your spending
- What types of things you could buy
- The most important mindset aspect of playing this game
You listen to that episode here.
Today, I talk about my personal approach to playing the game, including:
- Deciding if I would only buy new things, or would I also retire debt
- How much actual research would I do in making my decisions
- How specific would I be in my purchases
- What's the most expensive thing I've bought so far (hint: you can chill champagne in it)
As always, thanks for listening!
You can find me here:
WEBSITE: https://www.thorchallgren.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/thorchallgren
You can find me here:
WEBSITE: https://www.thorchallgren.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/thorchallgren
Hello, and welcome to Every Day A New Thought. I'm Thor Challgren. Today it's part two of my short series, "How to spend $465,000 in 30 days." This is me talking about how to play the prosperity game. And yesterday's episode, which was part one, I talked about how to get started with this. That's episode number 81 of Every Day A New Thought. So if you want to listen to that, it'll give you a framework for how this game started kind of the basics of how to play it.
In today's episode, I'm going to tell you how I personally implemented this. And there were things that I discovered along the way about decisions that I kind of had to make for myself as to how I was going to spend the money, and how I began to implement the process. So today, I'll talk about all of that. And at the end of the episode, I'm going to tell you the most expensive thing that I bought. So far, I've been playing this now for seven days.
So first, how I implemented it, how I keep track of it is I'm using an Excel spreadsheet, in the game, sort of the classic version invented years ago, you could use an old checkbook ledger. And I looked around and I didn't have one that I could use. So for me, a an Excel spreadsheet was something that was easy to set up, I simply put the date, and then I'd put whether it was money that came in. So like every day, I get $1,000 2000 3000. I write that. And then whatever expenses I have, I just subtract that from that. So it's fairly simple to create in Excel or Google Docs. So that's something that you can do.
The second sort of thing that I had to face was, how do I choose what to spend my money on? And one of the first questions that I came up with was, Do I just buy new things? Or do I do a combination of buying new things, paying down debt? Like maybe if you've got a car loan or a mortgage? For me? The answer was, yes, I would choose to do both, I would pay things down. And here's why I realized that for me, part of the paying down things like a car or the mortgage was that it felt good. My sort of rationale for me was as long as the energy of the spending was good was positive, then I was fine with it. If I spent something and it didn't feel good that I wouldn't make that choice. So I could imagine, for instance, that if I made a mortgage payment for that month, and I talked about it with my spouse, and I saw how excited she was, that felt good to me. And so in that moment, when I'm making that payment, that feels great to me. So that was my basically, the most important thing to me was, what does it feel like when I spend that money? If it feels good? Great. That's the choice I would make.
The next point that I sort of had to discover along the way was how much time do I invest in this meaning, when you think about shopping, and you know, yesterday's episode, I talked about how you want to be as detailed as possible in your purchase. So how much time do you spend imaginarily shopping, here's what works for me, as much time as I need to feel the energy of that purpose. So for instance, the first day when I had $1,000, one of the things I bought was three pairs of shoes. Now, I suppose what I could have done is just said, I don't know, you know, I'll spend like $500 on shoes, and I don't know how many I'll get. But I decided that for me, I wanted to know what kind of shoes I would get. So and this is great in the age of online shopping is you can actually go online and see how much things cost. So I went to Zappos, the shoe store and I researched the exact kind of shoes that I wanted. And I decided for however much I want her to spend somewhere around $500 I could get maybe it was three pairs of shoes, something like that maybe it was five or $600. Ladies, men have it much easier than you do our shoes are a lot cheaper. Any rate, I researched it and said I want this shoe and it cost this much. And I want this shoe. And then what I also could do was I imagined myself that day as owning those shoes. I saw them in my closet at home. And I imagined that when I was going out to a casual meeting I'd put on those Adidas casual running shoes. And that's what I wore that day or I'd imagine that if I was going for a nicer meeting that I'd put on those $300 Mephisto shoes that I'd always wanted.
So for me the point is research it so that you can actually get that feeling. I'll go even further that if I wanted to say on one day to fly a first class trip to Paris on Air France. I would actually go to their site and see what those lay flat seats look like. I'd imagine myself in those and then I'd look at when does that flight leave? Like what time of day would I be going to LAX and I'd see myself getting there, and eating in the first class lounge and then getting on the plane and turning left, because I know that the lay flat seat is in the left as you come in. So you see what I'm doing as I'm looking at this. And I actually even went and found what the price was so that I could actually imagine it. And I think at first I thought the price would be less. So I saved that purchase for a day, when I knew that I would have enough money to cover it.
So you get the sense for me anyway, now, everyone can have a different way of approaching it. But for me, I wanted to know the detail of it because I wanted to feel that energy, that expansive feeling of awesomeness of making that purchase.
Another point that I realized that I wanted to do was come up with a wish list. Because there would be in the moment, I'd be like, Oh, I can think of this and I want to buy this down the road. And so I've started make a list of the things that I would want. Because honestly, I got to one day, maybe it was either today or yesterday, or I got to the point and I'm like, how am I going to spend this money, which by the way, is an awesome question to ask, like to be able to go, I don't know that I want anything today, maybe I'll just pay down more of the house. So definitely consider making a list of things that you want. Because down the road, as this starts to snowball, you're gonna have a lot more money to imaginarily spend, and you may get to a day where you know, halfway through, you're going to have $15,000 to spend that day. So you need to start to imagine the kind of life that you have where you spend $15,000 in one day.
So for me, what have I bought in the first seven days? Well, I will say as as I mentioned, I pay down some debt expenses, that felt good. And I could imagine that good feeling. I mentioned I bought three pairs of shoes, I did that on Zappos, I bought something for our yard. And my biggest expense to date is that I bought a new refrigerator. I went, there's one I've been thinking about for awhile where I thought oh someday, and this is what I love is that you're turning some day into today. So someday, I thought I'll get that new LG refrigerator from Best Buy or wherever you get it that's got the four drawers. So I actually went to the Best Buy's website and saw and I looked at all the pictures. And I could imagine like, Is this really the one I want? Now I will say I did decide that I wasn't going to take the time to actually go to the store and look at that exact refrigerator. But it's not a bad idea. If you have the ability and the time to actually go and touch and see the thing that you are imagining having anything that you can do that creates the vividness of that experience increases the power of this exercise. So that fridge cost me $3,500. And I will tell you, I love my new refrigerator. That's how I've spent my money. Those are the choices I made the way that I sort of started this.
But I'm curious how you will play this game if you play the Prosperity Game. And I'm encouraging you to give it a try. Because honestly, it's a lot of fun. If you do it, I'd love to know how you choose to spend your money. How are you going to spend $465,000 In the next 30 days? What insights do you have about what matters to you? You know, that's one of the things you're going to discover. What types of things do you value? Is it possessions? Is it experiences? Is it charity? Is it giving to others? There are infinite ways to spend $465,000.
So I'm curious, what ways do you find to spend that and along the lines of the personal rules that I set up for myself? What rules do you adopt for how you'll spend the money? That's it for this episode.
I do know that I'm going to do a follow up episode after 30 days so be sure to look for the show in about 30 days time where I recap what I discovered overall from having spent $465,000 in 30 days until tomorrow. Have fun spending. Thanks so much for listening!