Upgrade Your Life Without Blowing Your Budget
Ever feel like you are living an economy-class life? An upgrade is easier than you think, according to entrepreneur Lorraine Murphy. In her new book, Step Into You, she outlines a route to abundance.
The concept of life upgrades was something I learnt from Denise Duffield-Thomas, and it has been instrumental in getting my money mindset back on track. Denise teaches that we can divide everything in our lives into four distinct camps, in line with the tiers of airline classes: so, Economy, Premium Economy, Business and First Class.
Denise believes that when we have too much Economy Class in our lives (that is, possessions that are underperforming, broken, don’t fit or stained) it pulls our money mindset down: we feel like we don’t have much money and we perpetuate that cycle by living our lives that way.
At the same time, when we recognise the First Class elements in our lives (things we would still have even if we had all the money in the world) we luxuriate in that feeling of abundance.
The idea is that we identify where “upgrades” are needed, and over time start to improve our lives.
I was shocked at how much Economy Class I had been putting up with in my life when I started out on my money mindset overhaul. And the funny thing was that it wasn’t the “big ticket” items like tech, our house and my clothes: it was the small things that I used sometimes multiple times a day that pulled me down the most.
The perfect example was our blender. We had a cheap smoothie maker that we used every single day. It was way beyond its finest days – the plastic beakers it came with were scratched, smoothie liquid had got into the base of it, making it smelly, and, worst of all, in its final days some ants had moved into it. Gross!
As soon as I identified it was Economy Class I went out and bought a gorgeous new glass blender. It wasn’t a top-of-the-range one, however it was a huge leap up from what we had been using. A year later and I still get a little upgrade buzz when I make our smoothies.
Since the blender upgrade I’ve been slowly completing upgrades in my life, including:
Finally replacing the phone holder in the car with one that doesn’t fall down every 10 minutes (cost: $45)
Getting a second phone charger for my office (cost: $20)
Having five years’ worth of dings, dents and cracked light covers on our lovely car fixed up (cost: $1000)
Replacing my four-year-old wallet that Lexi had doodled all over with a shiny new one (cost: $100)
Changing our mismatched and chipped dinnerware over to a beautiful terracotta set that makes every meal feel like a restaurant meal (cost: $80)
I used to think that abundance was a destination – for example, “I’ll feel abundant when I have $10,000 saved”, or “I’ll feel abundant when I can buy whatever I want at my favourite store”. However, what I’ve learnt is that abundance is a feeling. And when we can construct our lives in such a way that we’re feeling that abundance every day, we’re aligning ourselves with the energetic frequency of abundance, and we then generate even more of it in our lives.
Extract from Step Into You by Lorraine Murphy (Hachette, $32.99), available now.