Luxury is an Income Guild

Today we are merging the idea of wealth building with the permaculture concept of guilds. A guild is an organization of mutually beneficial plants designed to support each other. They spring up naturally under raw conditions as those plants with symbiotic natures reinforce the presence of each other. While seedlings can sprout anywhere, only those in a beneficial location survive. Gardners use this pattern of beneficial plants in beneficial locations to increase yield or beauty without resorting to chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Most permaculture guilds are described top-down but we are going to build our income guild in two-phases. The first phases prepare the soil and the farmer simultaneously while later phases capitalize on the initial ground work to create additional resources.

Grondcover

Let's start with our ground-level assumption. Choosing a ground cover defines the space and scale of the guild. It might be surprising, especially when we discuss some of the other items, but the ground-cover, the most basic principle of this guild, is Simple Living. If you want to build or maintain wealth, you need to manage your own desires. Recognize that wealth and luxury are quite different than extravagance. It is possible to have assets worth millions or even billions, without flaunting a TikTok lifestyle. Simple living is your most critical bridge to wealth. It is a hedge against consumerism, inflation, and lifestyle dysmorphia or hedonic adaptation. Reducing the scale of your time, money and social commitments will save your sanity, pocketbook and headspace.

I am not here to tell you you can't have a handbag by Hermes, fly first class, own a boat, ski house, beach condo or horse ranch if that is important to you. However, the time and monetary costs associated with these big ticket items is quite high, so consider carefully the lifestyle impacts you sign up for with these purchases. Remember, wealth is what you don't see. Choose wisely.

Nitrogen Fixers

Next, we want to improve the soil in our guild to help all the guild members thrive. Nitrogen fixers build soil health by pulling nitrogen out of the air and putting it into the soil where it is taken up by plants as fertilizer. It can seem like they create something from nothing. Skills, manners and self-discipline do much the same, taking ideas from thought to reality.

Skills are transferrable and don't require a specific niche for use. Skills are both learned and gifted by nature. They improve our chances of success in any endeavour. They can include mechanical aptitude, social grace, sales, accounting, and leadership. There are trades such as electricians, plumbers, hairstylists, auto mechanics, childcare, HVAC technicians, herb smiths, construction workers, etcetera. Skills come prior to education because they are more foundational to the building of a community, are transferrable and they are always in demand.

The next way to prepare the ground work is to master your manners and appearance. People aren't likely to give you opportunities if you are a brute or a bore or you chew with your mouth open. The same goes for a disheveled appearance. Leave the sweat pants at home, wash your hair and tighten up your act. Self-discipline follows on from this self-care and is the mother of all greatness. Self-discipline is how one can start anywhere and becomes excellent at anything. Self-discipline, like the wealth we wish to acquire and manage, is invisible initially but it is an engine that builds its own momentum.

Understory (Bushes and small trees)

In a guild, one could neglect the understory entirely. Of course, the results may be less spectacular than they could have been. Often, smaller fruit trees benefit from wind or sun protection from a larger, more mature tree and then benefit the farmer with their own fruits. Education and the attainment of knowledge are such small fruit trees. You could work a trade your whole life and not miss out on having a college education but the fruits of learning adorn the educated by providing historical context to life or a deeper understanding of the fabric of life. Financial education is certainly important for managing finances. Ongoing education is important for everybody who wants to continue to grow instead of wither. Knowledge, where information is synthesized into a new understanding or approach to life, is the goal of education. It's attainment is up to you.

Pest Deterrents

Pests can level a garden in less than a day if left unchecked. They infiltrate invisibly (or under cover of night), multiply rapidly and are insatiable. Pest Deterrents keep your guild healthy and harmoniously balanced. They prevent or mitigate the impacts of pests on your guild. Plants, especially annuals and seedlings are sensitive to everything from lighting conditions to mold, fungus, insects and vermin. Thus, planning is essential to ensure the plants in the guild are appropriately located and protected from pests. An impatient gardener is one of the worst types of pests in the garden. They water too often or use too much mulch, or disturb the soil in inappropriate ways.

Managing your income guild requires planning, patience and prudence. These are the best deterrents against a ravaged guild. Planning means understand your expenses. I don't mean only your monthly expenses but also your annual expenses and plans for future expenses; children, college, career change. It also means that you take steps to reduce them where appropriate. You understand your monthly income and have allocated percentages to three categories; saving, charity, spending. Patience means you understand that things take time. Pace yourself at work and in building this guild. Give it time to grow and allow the systems to do the heavy lifting. Patience is the ability to delay gratification. Nobody ever made a tree taller by pulling it out of the ground.

Remember our pesky gardener? New gardeners have almost all been guilty of uprooting a plant before it was ready to harvest or uprooting a plant they thought was a weed only to discover it was actually what they were trying to grow. Prudence goes hand and hand and hand with planning and patience. Prudence gives us the self-discipline to follow our plan and remain patient while waiting for the guild to grow.

One of the best ways I know to manage the imprudent gardener in all of us is automation. Once you have determined a plan for your income, you make it impossible to fail by using automated transfers to pay your bills and move your money into the assets you want to build.

Central Feature

The Main Feature of a permaculture guild is often a large tree. The tree provides shade, habitat and wind protection to the guild members. It has deep roots and does not move or break easily. It stands tall in all weather and is not easily uprooted or moved. The main feature of your income guild is your largest source of income. That is often employment or retirement savings but it could also be an inheritance of which you are the steward. This large tree is your capital. The capital you trade your life-time for every day, or the capital someone thoughtfully gifted you to manage.

Whether you have an old tree (inheritance). mature tree (retirement) or are still growing your mighty oak (career), you do not want to chop limbs off your tree. Clearly the worst thing you could do would be to cut it down. That would look like spending every penny you earn or spending the capital out of your inheritance without a plan. It could even look like leaving old money in bad investments, which would mean disease to the tree. If old money knows anything, it is that capital shouldn't be allowed to rot.

Mineral Accumulators

Mineral Accumulators are deep-rooted plants that pull minerals to the surface and make them available to plants topside. They also create air pockets by loosening the soil. This gives the guild space below ground and resources to expand when conditions are right and opportunity arises. Having a Savings or Sinking Fund allows us to cover our own outlays and expenses with ease. For example, the bi-annual auto insurance bill, repairs to our (modest) homes, and planned vacations. Cash on the other hand provides the fuel to purchase assets at a discount when others are selling at a loss as well as using it to invest in "the flowers" of ownership.

Pollinator Attractors

Pollinator Attractors are the bright, showy and often scented flowers that attract those beautiful and beneficial insects to our guild. The pollinators help every flowering plant to grow into its full potential. Investing is a way of pollinating your money/ plants to allow it to grow to its full potential. The pollinators do all the work on their own and don't require any additional effort from you. Buying and owning a business can multiply your money in the same way, while also increasing yield in the areas of planning, prudence, skills and knowledge.

Benefits of an Income Guild

Each of these contributors can be individually revised or changed as long as you don't deviate from the original intention. For example, if you wanted to change careers, you may need additional Education and Skills. Adopting a new fitness routine may affect Planning, Simple Living and Self-Discipline. Notice also that since everything is related and required, ignoring or poorly executing one category is going to impact every other item in the system. The guild metaphor illustrates that moving away from simple living or cutting down the tree entirely is the fastest way to destroy the guild. Let's not do that.

Constructing an income guild can take years but the good news is, if you are reading this blog, you are already at least halfway through the process. When implemented, an income guild benefits you by reducing the labor required to grow your assets. You have the option to trade less of your life-time for money and allow the money and time to do the heavy lifting. Automation reduces the labor of paying bills and assigning resources to assets. Once labor is reduced, we have more free life-time while our assets grow on their own. Or, we have the resources and can attain the skills and education to increase our productivity; either our own personal contribution to society, or we get a promotion, change careers, or start a business venture. Just remember to keep everything in balance.