Why You Should Try to Pay More Taxes in Your Life

Taxes exist to finance many of the services we take for granted.

Without taxes, we would have no roads or highways. No police, firefighters or ambulances.

We wouldn’t have the means to pay political leaders run our country, or to pay teachers to educate our children.

We moan and begrudge paying them, but plan our spending around it, and pay them nonetheless.

Taxes work because (1) in most cases they are automatically deducted and (2) the penalty for not paying is significant.

Taxes are such a handy mechanism that — in any area of your life where you’re looking to make steady progress — you should aim to pay as much taxes as you possibly can bear.

Here are some examples.

Want to save more money? Incorporate an additional 10% tax on your after-tax earnings.

Automatically deposit that 10% in a separate bank account that you never see. The auto-deposit system at Wealthsimple is very useful for this as it enforces the tax without your intervention.

Want to lose weight? Incorporate a calorie tax.

Start tracking your calories for a week using a tool like MyFitnessPal, then the following week set your goal to be 10% then you are currently eating on a daily basis. Use a tool like Stickk to as your penalty for not paying this tax.

Want to start something new (business, meditation, classes, fitness routine)? Incorporate a time tax.

Make it a rule that you must wake up an hour earlier, or sleep an hour later to make the time for this new pursuit.

Imagine you woke up tomorrow and days were 23 hours long instead of 24. You’d be bothered at first, but eventually you’d adapt and forget that a 24 hour day ever existed.

Treat your days going forward as if they were only 23 hours long, and use that extra hour for your new pursuit.

Taxes aren’t a necessary evil. Taxes are valuable tool that systematically enable progress.

So pay up.

Daniel Rodic is an entrepreneur; the Co-Founder and CEO of Exact Media and a representative of Canada at the G20 Entrepreneurship Summit in Moscow and Beijing. Daniel’s been named a Top 30 Under 30 by Forbes Magazine.