Intentions: Money

Is there a way to be financially wise among a culture as materialistic and consumeristic as the bike industry or the billion-dollar fitness industry?

In Short

Instead of {cultural norm}, we practice {counter-formational idea}. We commit to {counter-formational activity}

Our reality

Our avocation asks a lot of our money and rewards those who can spend more with more speed, more charisma, and, to a point, a more enjoyable cycling experience. We can buy speed with more aerodynamic gear, faster shifting, lighter components, specially formulated endurance fuel, coaches, training apps. And, honestly, most cyclists who have had the feeling of climbing a challenging hill or navigating difficult singletrack with some sort of mastery know that speed is fun!

We can buy the identity of the cyclist’s we admire by emulating the professionals or amateurs: with the right clothing, right bikes, or whatever is the expected look of our favorite discipline. Yet gear is always evolving and improving, asking us to upgrade. The moment we purchase something new, that item is almost immediately out-dated. Companies spend billions of dollars to instill in us how everything is constantly getting better and how we need the latest. We idolize the professionals and their 6.8kg, super aero, cream of the crop bicycles who ride for work, or their super-top-of-the-line dual-suspension XC mountain bike. Yet we are self-supported and the responsible use of our money has many other needs. The team budget backing our endeavors is the money we and our families earn. We don’t have a team budget to back us.

Instead of seeing cycling as a hobby for our disposable income, we practice reasonable spending and purposefully re-allocate money towards generosity within the cycling community we are a part of.

Practices

Baseline practice

As a baseline practice we commit to:

• working out what “reasonable spending” around cycling means in terms of our current stage of life and financial situation.

Reach practices

As reach practices, many of us aspire to:

• Delay the upgrading our gear
• Set a delayed purchased agreement with ourselves and any of those who we share financial responsibilities with
• Fight against the [[n+1 rule]] with the [[The n-1 bike rule]], where the perfect number of bikes is always one more than you need, and instead we seek to optimize the number of bikes we have to what we can reasonably enjoy
• give away or sell our bikes and gear at a discount when we do upgrade, giving a friend or someone interesting in cycling but limited by the financial buy-in, the opportunity to