Aside from redeveloping the new look site, I’ve been thinking about labour exchange again.

In Holistic Personal Finance, I posited a direct relationship between time, money and health. Creating an abundance of any one, depletes the others. The example I used was income – if your employer cuts your hours, you have to choose:

• Do you find additional work hours somewhere else, possibly reducing your ability to get enough exercise and sleep? Not to mantion sacrificing well-balanced home cooked meals for junk food?
• Or do you choose to change your purchasing habits so you spend less money? This might mean reducing the amount of meat you eat, and adding more plants. Or reducing your heating costs, moving somewhere cheaper or cutting your subscription services.

Health

As I recently discovered, protecting your health comes at a cost too. I’ve tried to space my heath monitoring appointments more or less throughout the year, and there are a lot of them:

• quarterly transplant and general health checks
• six-monthly dental checks
• annual eye, skin, and gyneacological checks
• mammograms every year and a half
• bowel screening every three years

Vaccinations

During my last quarterly health check I took this year’s covid vaccination, and have an appointment coming up for a flu vaccination too.

I’d forgotten how badly they affect me, or maybe it’s because it’s been a while since I had a booster.

But I was laid out for almost a fortnight. A fortnight where the Labour Exchange triangle was oriented so far in the direction of no money it might as well have been a line instead.

And yet, getting a vaccination was the :”right” thing to do to protect myself and others. For the next three to six months (I hope). They’re a bit like the flu vaccinations in that we won’t really know how effective they are until the season proper starts.

Which coincidentally, is about now…

So the vaccination, while costing me a fortnight, could save me several weeks in hospital, and I think that’s worth the cost.

Like insurance.

What are your thoughts on vaccinations?