Have there been times in your life when you have done something financially which deep down inside you knew you shouldn’t have done? Maybe it was buying that new car that stretched your budget to breaking point. Perhaps you got caught up in the hype surrounding a certain investment which you knew wasn’t really the sure thing it was being made out to be, leaving you out of pocket as a result. Or you might even have bought a house that you knew really needed A LOT of work but you wanted it so bad that you convinced yourself that the improvements were just cosmetic – can you tell that is a mistake that I made in the past? Thankfully it all turned out OK in the end but looking back I really should have just listened to my gut.

So, after your first week at university you have revamped your wardrobe, made some friends, emptied several crates of beer, cider and spirits and possibly lent a little cash out to those poor souls who haven’t received their student loans yet. The problem with testing out how many lectures and hours of sleep you can miss in the first few weeks of higher ‘education’ is forgetting the effect it has on your bank balance.

The question of how much sleep we need to get is an interesting one. What is even more interesting is the thought that it could greatly affect our personal life, our career and our financial situation.

There have been some famously successful people who have claimed to sleep very little each night. Margaret Thatcher was said to get by with as little as 4 hours a night. Other examples of people who sleep very little are Barrack Obama, Jay Leno, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Thomas Edison, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Franklin. They all reportedly sleep or slept 5 hours or less each night. A quick bit of online research shows than many wealth businesspeople and CEOs boast of sleeping very little each night as well. So what are the benefits to the ideal length of kip and how much should you get ideally?

One of the biggest shifts in the work patterns of recent generations has to be the move away from physical work towards office and even online work instead. While we need to move with the times, an infographic I came across the other day about how much healthier tradespeople tend to be really reminded me of the health benefits that physical work can bring, and how if your daily work routine doesn’t involve much exercise then it is essential that we get enough exercise in other ways. So what can you do to increase the amount of exercise you get each day? Here are a few ideas, some of them you will have heard before but perhaps it’s time to consider them again.

We all know Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote, don’t we? ‘In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes’. Well I’d like to add a third thing to that list and that is that life always changes. Very rarely do we stay in the same situation for our entire lives. We move home, we change jobs, we have children, and sadly, even marriage is far from a done deal these days. Our situation in life changes constantly and as a result we will always be faced with times of transition.