Beyond financial wealth

Coffee
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I found an interesting framework for various forms of wealth, it’s called the “8 forms of capital”. While we often discuss about financial and material capital (aka real estate), the other forms are just as important to create resilient wealth.

  1. Material Capital – the raw and processed non-living resources, such as rock, lumber, buildings, tools, fuel, and so forth, as well as stored up goods that our activities generate.
  2. Intellectual Capital – what we know and have learned; the stored knowledge and ideas that are available to us.
  3. Experiential Capital – “street smarts” or the “school of hard knocks”, this is the difference between what a novice and a master knows. This is Grandma’s biscuit recipe, for which there is no recipe, only the feel of the dough in the hands.
  4. Cultural Capital – the shared art, music, myths, stories, ideas, and worldviews of a community; collectively held as a holistic sum of individual beliefs, thoughts and actions.
  5. Social Capital – the goodwill from others that your service to your community creates, the favors you owe and are owed, and the connections and network that you have.
  6. Natural Capital – plants, animals, soil, and the collective properties of ecosystems, such as purifying and circulating water and storing nutrients.
  7. Spiritual Capital – our capacity to live into the fullest, most authentic expression of ourselves, and our ability to connect with and receive guidance from something greater than ourselves.
  8. Financial Capital – the money, currency and other financial assets we have acquired.

It’s about the time spent to acquire and maintain all of these capitals and about the balance between them. I would be interested to hear your thoughts and musings on this rather philosophical approach to FI.

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I haven’t dived in this framework, but as a first read, it just seems to lack of 2 fundamental dimensions:

  • Health: just one letter difference but wealth is nothing without it. Think about Steve Jobs as a famous example. I’ll always choose life and all the feelings it can bring, just as simple as one breathe. Living a kind of real second life, I can swear that nothing can afford that

  • Emotions: I was talking with my daughter (16yo) just less than 2 hours ago about how to think about her future and saving money. But telling her too that there’s no better wealth than happiness if this make sense as a word. And this feeling, the great emotions you can feel sometimes with a ray of sun, a great sunset over some blue water, the look of a girl on you or her voice telling you some love words, the feeling of a soft silky skin under your hand, the birth of your kids… When all of these things happen without trade, money… It means it has really no price

I feel rich of being alive and being able to live and experience very simple things, but so many sometimes
All the rest is bonus.

Live a life connected with nature and your environment, your family, your emotions

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