Fast forwarding from then to now, I managed to get pretty far. Pretty far in killing my debt, pretty far in personal growth and pretty far in creating a spending habit that feels damn good while still being able to save and invest quite a lump of money. At years' start, my monthly spending forecast looked quite good. Being able to save around 30% of my income seemed manageable (and is, really!).
Now that I'm well away and the first quarter passed, I am beginning to feel some cravings here and there. This started with a feeling I did want to go away for a weekend or week or something. See the world. Which is quite ridiculous since I blown of this idea in the first months of this year since I wanted to save money and vacation days for a long trip by the beginning of next year. The next crazy thing was wanting to buy STUFF! Hmmm.. Need STUFF!!!
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| Remember this for goodness' sake! |
Since I see my money meter slowly going up, all of a sudden I feel sad about having sold my studio monitor speakers. I used to watch a movie now and then and listen to some music on them (they sounded quite awesome given their size) and I am starting to say things to myself like "I am allowed to enjoy life, and music and good sound is important to me". While I really do like good music, this feeling only really started to nest deep inside me when I noticed one of my neighbors' speakers and we talked about me selling mine.
Then, this weekend, my significant other asked me why I was investing most of my money and not just putting some of it aside in a savings account, just to have a little emergency fund. I made some sort of a 'market up, need ROI' excuse, but the thought really didn't let me go. So somewhat later, it hit me. The one and only reason I'm buying stocks and not putting a lot aside is because that way it's money spend and no longer for the take. If I just put it in a savings account I'll be sure to make up just about anything to spend it.
Pretty typical that this is a fear (spending my money) so strongly related to a craving (buy stuff I "need" that makes me "happy"). I talked about it the moment I realized it. It's maybe not even a bad thing to let's say 'invest' my money in things I really like (custom drum stuff maybe?) to be able to sell these items later on for the same money if not even more. A sort of a side-hustle/hobby project. But for the moment, I really should hold my things together and just keep on living the way I am living. Things are good, I don't need more stuff lying around.
One way to deal with this, it to simply write my "needs" down on a list and just let them stay there for a while. When the craving goes and I'm not really that bothered with having it anyway, it wasn't that much of a "need" anyway. Another way to deal with this, is by saving some money to be spend to whatever I would like to spend it. My yearly budget is quite tight, meaning there's a lot of money free but this mainly goes into my investing account since I have set a goal for myself there. With every penny being budgeted into all other areas in life, there's no room what so ever for 'fun' things. So I came up with an idea. As of this month, I'm going up on the monthly pay-grade with a small amount of money. At my current employer, doing your job right, means you go up a step every year until you hit the top of the scale you're in. I've got a couple of years left, so this means my spending could stay the same while my saving rate could go up. For the rest of this year, I accounted the little bit of extra money into a column reading "free to spend on/save for fun things". This could be anything, like a nice set of speakers or a cool kind of snare drum. Whatever I like. The fun part in this, is I get to see a small amount of money monthly growing slowly into a sizeable amount which could make a difference. Then, when I have enough, I can decide: do I want to spend this money on some sort of want, or do I want this money just to be left alone or to be invested anyway.
As of today, I promise myself to stay off of all the expensive shizzle that's out there until I've saved enough for it.
As for the rest of this year goes, I do hope to be able to put aside a serious sum of money in a way I might end up paying for my next year mostly out of my yearly budget and putting my full salary to work at refilling that budget and going into investments. In the end that should mean I need to fill a money tank with around 20K to live on, and from that moment on just keeping it filled up and investing the rest of my money. For some reason that feels like an awful lot of freedom since I can pay myself a year up ahead before I "need" to go to work again!
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