Lifestyle - Hipster Homesteaders

7 Life Skills You (Possibly) Don’t Need But We Love to Have

When it comes to thinking about life skills, there are some that everyone should have. Things like basic cooking, doing taxes, being responsible with credit/budgeting, driving a car, first aid, etc., are all skills that we would consider to be essential no matter where you live.

But what about life skills that are not necessarily essential and are more fun or increase the quality of your life all the same? Well, we put together a list of life skills we've been learning over the years that, while perhaps not essential to everyday life, help raise our standard of living considerably.

I'm always one to be looking forward to the future. I find the future to be exciting and, hopefully, better than today, which was better than yesterday, and so on.

But sometimes I am introspective, and look to the past to take stock on what all I have accomplished (or missed!). While I think I am fortunate enough to have lived a pretty fulfilling life so far, there are some things I wish someone would've told me along the way to help set me on the path that I am on today.

So, in this one, I thought I'd look back on what I could tell my 20-year-old self. What has gone well, what I'd do differently, and more. If you are 20 and thinking what the future may have in store, this one is for you!

Throughout our lifestyle design series I'm going to be referencing a lot of ideas, plans, and topics that came about as the result us taking a long-term trip in 2013-2014. What it boils down to is that our 15 month trip simply gave us a lot of time to start thinking about our life goals.

With this abundance of time, we also made it a side goal of ours to read a lot of books. We hardly read at home, so our trip seemed like the perfect opportunity to change that. After reading through the complete Game of Thrones series, the entire tome of Sherlock Holmes, The Millennium Trilogy (which is amazing, by the way), and several other popular works we missed, I had to take a step back and ask myself if I was using my time wisely.

As you can imagine, I realized I wasn't.

At this point I decided to start reading what were considered to be the best marketing books to improve my knowledge of different fields that I would end up using later on. Several of the books I bought were crap. Others were quite good.

Overall, I came up with a list of six books that I can highly recommend for the entrepreneurs in our audience.

There is one thing that pisses me off about financial savings articles, and that is the recap of a saver's journey.

The articles generally start with the person in question sharing their debt load, the plan they followed, and skips to the fact that they became debt free because of it X years later. That's great, but what is missing is the many years of hard work and commitment that it took to make the goal become a reality.

When boiled down to 500 words it sounds amazing that someone can pay off a big debt in a “short” period of time. We could do this in talking about how we paid off $50,000 in student loan and car debt in 33 months, but there is a little secret no one ever shares: those months or years in the middle suck.

While articles tend to shrug this off as being part of the very nature of this method (which is true), a period of several years is still a huge chunk of time. And that in-between time does not go by as quick as you'd like while large sums of money disappear every single paycheck.

But I am here to tell you today to not get discouraged- it is worth it. You just need to know a few things along the way that others are not so eager to tell you about.

7 Life Skills You (Possibly) Don’t Need But We Love to Have

3 Things I Wish I Could Tell My 20 Year Old Self

6 of the Best Marketing Books We Use for Our Lifestyle Design

How We Paid Off $50,000 in 33 Months with a Debt Avalanche