Take the Easy Win.
In your day to day life, most of the things we want have to be worked for. However occasionally there are easy wins.
The interesting thing is we very often don’t see them as easy wins or we don’t see them at all. What’s the definition of an easy win? An easy win would simply be something that doesn’t take very much of your time or effort and yet gives you a pretty good return whatever that return is.
Free Money From Employers
As an example, many employers have a “matching program” for your pension plan or retirement account. What that means is, for every dollar that you invest in the retirement or pension plan your company will give you a matching amount. That would be an easy win. This is literally free money that the company is giving you for being a part of the plan! And yet many people either don’t see it or don’t take advantage of this easy win.
There are even some companies that will contribute to a retirement account for you without you putting in any money at all! All you need to do is sign up for it.
If your employer has a stock plan where you invest part of your salary into company stock and they will match and give you company stock, that is also free money. Now in the case of a stock plan, there are other considerations like is it a stock that you would like to own and is it performing well? If you have questions like this, you may wish to ask yourself if that’s really a company you want to continue to work for. However, if it’s a company that you truly believe in being a part of a free stock plan is an easy win.
Free Government Money
There are also certain kinds of investments that are easy wins. For instance, in the United States, some municipal bonds are tax free! If you have an investment decision where both investments are exactly the same, why would you not choose the one where you don’t have to pay tax?
There is also an investment called the Registered Education Savings Plan. In this Canadian plan you can invest up to $2500 per year per child and the government will give you a 20% grant. Just for having this account. So that means that if you invest the maximum, the government will give you $500 for free! This is definitely an easy win. Even if you don’t have $2500 a year you can still take advantage of this plan by doing as much as you can afford and still getting the 20% free money from the government.
Of course, you can’t tell people what to do day in and day out, however why would you not take easy wins in life? Most people will agree that there aren’t that many out there.
Free Money in Everyday Life.
There are examples of easy wins all around us every single day. There are many employers out there who will pay you more for getting more education. Teachers for instance can go up the pay scale if they take more courses. Very often the school board will pay or at least partially subsidize these courses! So not only do they pay for you to take the education but once you pass the course, they increase your salary. Even if you had to pay for part of these courses, they usually do not cost very much, but the salary increase can be substantial. Once again, this is an easy win.
Some companies will include what’s called a car allowance in their pay package for their employees. That means that they will pay a certain amount per month towards your vehicle expenses because you are using your own vehicle to do the job. Now, this is usually a taxable benefit, however you can use it as you wish and literally use any vehicle that you want to do the job.
The point is to keep your eyes open for easy wins and take advantage of them when you can.