Friends worth more than their weight in gold

Originally posted on Blogger 23 August 2011.

I have a wonderful friend. She is the type of friend that when you tell her something, she’s there cheering you on. I’ve seen what happens sometimes when she says something that most people consider to be outlandish and they say so: ‘Oh, is that wise?’ Maybe this is why when I said to her that I’d found something I wanted to study but the teacher was in the US so I’d have to go there to study, she didn’t ask if I had the money or did the teacher have the qualifications or was I being realistic. No. She said, ‘Fantastic!’ She was there cheering me on.

Once the joy of finding something that called to me, and the opportune time for my friend to pop in and be supportive had passed, I did go back to my teacher’s web site to check and see how I could make this work. That’s when I realised she teaches by teleconference. I found the solution, I was being realistic but it was nice to have someone that was supportive when I had found something that I could be passionate about.

Do you have friends like that?

Similarly I have the friends who are well meaning, but look for holes. The ones who say your outlandish plan will never work. Don’t waste your money. From them I learned to be careful in what I tell them.

I have one friend who shot down a complete pie in the sky idea. It wasn’t going to happen, but it was a ‘what if’ exercise anyway: something to do while avoiding something else. I’d heard many times: ‘If only I could win the lottery, I would only need a million dollars.’ I wondered, given the opportunity, how much would I want to win. It may seem a waste a of time, but useful because it was time spent in the mindset of ‘if I had all the money I needed, what would I be doing now?’

The figure I came to was using basic calculations. How much would I need to have that given a clear return on investment where half was reinvested to grow the principal and the other half was sufficient to live on? I know how much it cost to run me per year. I’m not asking for a massive figure, just something reasonable. I would want to still work, so this income would cover all costs. Any additional earnings would be icing.

But why stop there? What if I had half that amount again and I could use that, where half of the interest was reinvested and half was used, for philanthropic purposes. This sent me off to thinking what I would like to support.

Then there was the amount to just set myself up – home, car etc.

It was a fun exercise, kept me occupied for some time and since Facebook probably wasn’t invented yet, gave me something to do!
It is easier to dare to dream when you’ve spent a bit of time in that dream. The winning lotto exercise was years ago, some time before I did my ‘way out of the ball park’ planning, but it made it a bit easier to do because I had lived in that space of being able to dream without worrying about how to afford it.

My dreams are not set in stone; they do grow and develop. When they start to look really clear, crystal clear it seems that they are much closer to happening.