What future do you envision for yourself? For your family? You likely hope it includes prosperity in the form of some degree of financial freedom.
But how will you achieve financial freedom if you don’t take care of your health?
This would be a sensitive subject for most Americans, given that most are overweight.
Yet the fact remains: If you don’t keep yourself healthy by your lifestyle and habits, then what hope is there in achieving that prosperity for yourself and loved ones?
Every single one of us has choices available to us everyday to get healthy.
Making the time, every single day (no exceptions!) to choose habits that are beneficial and, the opposite, choose to refrain from those habits that aren’t, isn’t easy.
But easy is not the point and is a useless excuse.
The point is your future, and if you don’t do these things, then it almost doesn’t matter what other types of goals you set for yourself, because you will have diminished health to enjoy them, let alone achieve them.
Stephen Covey, in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, posits that it takes about 21 days to develop or change a habit.
And that definitely would apply to improving one’s health so other goals can be met.
It’s a huge disconnect we are experiencing in this country: We know we need to save for our future, and that we need to develop and nurture a career and skill sets that will carry us through decades of work.
Yet we sabotage those 2 by choosing poor lifestyle habits that lead to overweight and exhausted bodies.
That road leads to an old age of impairments and diminished quality of life, a way you absolutely don’t want to live, and a definite way to exhaust whatever funds you have managed to save for your retirement years.
The less healthy one is the more they will have to spend on health care.
The less healthy one is the less they can work, and the less their performance and enthusiasm will carry them through their career.
The road is long, and we may have to work alot longer than originally anticipated, so getting and staying healthy is the single best thing you can do to ensure that you can continue to work and save for your future, and that your funds won’t get exhasted by lifestyle-related health costs.
(Disclosure: I am a Fee-Only Financial Planner. My website is here.)