This article just cropped up on my Facebook feed: "A Guide to Saving Money for People Who Love Spending Money." Oo goody, I thought, clicking, I've got a decent handle on my spending, but maybe I can glean a few more tips!
Narp.
Actually what I took away from the article was, Who lives like this? For real, who needs a tip to reduce their number of manicures to a few a month? Or to stop buying bottled sparkling water and spend $80 on a machine that will do it for you? Or to buy groceries at a grocery store instead of a convenience store?
I hope this article is targeting college students. I hope it's not relevant to 35-year-olds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming any miserly brilliance. For the last fifteen years I've lived under the eye-bulging weight of credit card debt and underemployment in a terrible economy. I know the demoralizing dread of those horrible window envelopes and the panic triggered by strange area codes on the caller ID that always mean calls from creditors. I am no stranger to the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS followed by a $35 bank fee, and I have known, intimately, the sleepless 3 a.m.s frantically calculating mental math tallies that add up to "you can't eat tomorrow." I've paid bills with credit cards because I only had enough money in the bank to cover the minimum payment on the credit card. I know the helpless shame that comes from living at the mercy of debt.
A good part of my troubles stemmed from the fact that no one ever taught me how to manage money. All I really knew was "saving is good," but I never had enough to save, so everything else was more or less fair game. The rest of the trouble is my personality. I'm a creature of comfort, a creature of impulse. My sister and I call me an "Epicurean hedonist." (We haven't come up with anything for her. Spartan ascetic? When we were kids, I was always the one who spent my allowance the second it came into my hands on candy and toy horses, while she hoarded hers in a coffee can under her bed. I used to borrow money from her. We always joked that when we grew up, I'd be the starving artist scratching my stories onto the floorboards of some unheated attic in charcoal while she sent me care packages. It never came to that, but she's definitely the only reason I have a 401-k). Between those two characteristics -- ignorance and lack of discipline -- I had gouged myself pretty badly by the time I turned twenty-seven.
I started getting my shit together six-ish years ago when I had to close out a credit card account to bring down my minimum payments to something I could afford. That was the moment I realized that my system was unsustainable and needed to change. Shortly thereafter, once I returned to intensive therapy to deal with my family dynamics and my crippling depression and learned that change was entirely within my power, I realized that I could do something to make my personal economics different.
Boy was that an uphill climb. And very, very slow. I was living with my parents and making $10 an hour at a part-time job; slowly was the only way I could make any changes at all. I started by making all of my bill payments on time. I went back to school, both for a career change (which I'm still working on) and to help with living expenses. I chipped away at my credit card debt. Eventually I got a better job and could afford to live on my own again, but between the credit card payments and my still-undisciplined spending, I was just barely scraping by.
About a year ago I decided I'd had enough with uncontrolled poverty, so one weekend I sat down with a notebook and a calculator and worked out how to become (credit card) debt free in a year. (There are still the student loans, ohmyfuckinggod there will always be the student loans.) I crafted a ruthlessly stingy budget, and mostly stuck to it. I carved out room in my budget to start saving, and rearranged my shopping habits -- grocery shopping once a week at Aldi, with a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for the other adds-up-to-way-too-much-money stupid necessities like tampons and hair care products and deodorant and cat litter. I generated a budget for each pay period, with groceries and gas and the monthly bills that fell due during that time. I kept that budget in a little notebook that I carried with me everywhere, and consulted it regularly to check off the bills I'd paid and track my bank balances, my spending, and how they measured against my budget. I shopped around for better car-and-renter's-insurance plans, and used my income tax return to pay for the entire year's insurance premium all at once, to free up my monthly spending. I set money aside for car inspection, registration and repairs. I saved for modest vacations. I stopped eating out.
In short, I buckled the hell down.
And it worked. A year later, I have reached my basic goals. I'm still poor, but I'm no longer strapped. I have hauled myself out of the well.
(I remember, when I first decided to make this happen a year ago, excitedly telling my then-best-friend my new financial plan. Her response was wistful, envious and a little dour. I think she would have been flat-out unsupportive, but the previous year when I decided to lose forty pounds and get in better shape and she scoffed at me for it, I bought an exercise machine, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, revolutionized my exercise and eating habits, lost all the weight, and then kept it off, so she knew that I would be able to achieve this next goal.
Actually, in retrospect, I think that moment, as we sat across from each other at our favorite breakfast cafe and I enthusiastically showed her my new tactics for getting a handle on my money, was another crack in the foundation of our friendship. It's been seven months since we parted ways, but by the time the parting happened, I think it had been coming for awhile. I know that memory is a faulty thing, and it's a human tendency to craft narratives in hindsight to make sense of our experiences, so I don't hold my own perspective as hard-line data; but still it seems to me that she had trouble with each leap forward that I made in my personal growth. It's a loss I'm still processing, since it's not a loss I chose, and I imagine my musings on it will crop up here occasionally.)
And I can with absolute confidence say that is it amazing not to live in fear of INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and to assume that a strange area code is just a wrong number. I put in a lot of hard work, and the rewards are deeply satisfying, empowering and confidence-building. I love that I can read articles with money-saving tips and realize that I internalized them a long time ago. I know I'm tooting my own horn here, and to those who are reading this who found insight in the above-linked article that I'm heaping with scorn, I'm sorry. I guess I grew up knowing that convenience stores are money pits and that getting Starbucks is a black hole in your bank account (huh! I guess I learned a few things about frugality from my upbringing after all; we didn't have any money growing up, so my mother shopped very very thriftily), but if you didn't know that, holy shit yes, it's true. Start shopping at Aldi and stop buying Starbucks. Also pack your lunch. (I basically don't eat during the day, so packing my lunch is as easy as keeping a bag of almonds at work.) You can totally do it. And once you've done it, you'll feel awesome about having figured your shit out for yourself. And then you can turn into an asshole braggadocio like me.
God I love being in my thirties.
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