But, like, how do you actually do that? I make three times what I did in grad school, but somehow it doesn’t feel like my standard of living has changed much, and I still basically spend everything I make...
I guess the problem is that “consumptive patterns” can be sneaky, and sometimes you didn’t notice they were there all along. The rent doubled because I moved to a city, even though my apartment’s not much nicer; my cell phone is no longer on a family plan; my parents no longer buy me plane tickets home for Christmas; I take the train to work every day. Maybe the cat gets sick and suddenly there are vet bills. In other words, nothing that feels like much of a change in consumption, yet the expenses keep going up.
And then there are a bunch of little expenditures, each one of which feels reasonable: What’s the harm in fresh vegetables, or a gym membership; won’t you save money on health problems in the long run? Wouldn’t it be dumb to worry about a $10 movie ticket or spend 20 minutes looking for free parking, when you make $30+/hr? I know people who make a lot of money but spend a lot of time and effort trying to avoid small expenses, and that doesn’t seem like a good way to live either. Sometimes I think the “save half your income and retire early” crowd is actually just faking it somehow.
Do you have a way of seeing your expenditures for the past year, categorized and summed? Use Mint or something similar. Take a day every couple years to go through and look at _all_ of them and determine which are simply extraneous, which you don’t endorse.
If you buy some weights and exercise at home, or exercise using your own body weight, you could save money and time! And maybe even exercise more, if going to the gym is a trivial inconvenience.
But yeah, living alone increases your expenses. The expenses per person then decrease again when you have a partner.
Totally agree about having weights at home. Besides the cost, one upside is there’s no energy barrier to exercising—I can take a 1-minute break from browsing the web or whatever, do a set, and go back to what I was doing without even breaking a sweat. A downside is it’s harder to get in the mindset of doing a full high-intensity workout for 45 minutes; but I think it’s a good tradeoff overall.
But, like, how do you actually do that? I make three times what I did in grad school, but somehow it doesn’t feel like my standard of living has changed much, and I still basically spend everything I make...
I guess the problem is that “consumptive patterns” can be sneaky, and sometimes you didn’t notice they were there all along. The rent doubled because I moved to a city, even though my apartment’s not much nicer; my cell phone is no longer on a family plan; my parents no longer buy me plane tickets home for Christmas; I take the train to work every day. Maybe the cat gets sick and suddenly there are vet bills. In other words, nothing that feels like much of a change in consumption, yet the expenses keep going up.
And then there are a bunch of little expenditures, each one of which feels reasonable: What’s the harm in fresh vegetables, or a gym membership; won’t you save money on health problems in the long run? Wouldn’t it be dumb to worry about a $10 movie ticket or spend 20 minutes looking for free parking, when you make $30+/hr? I know people who make a lot of money but spend a lot of time and effort trying to avoid small expenses, and that doesn’t seem like a good way to live either. Sometimes I think the “save half your income and retire early” crowd is actually just faking it somehow.
Just some quick thoughts:
Housemates and other group-living arrangements can make living in cities affordable
Pets are expensive (though probably worth it for lots of people)
Flights are expensive (though deals can be had)
Car ownership is expensive
The internet can provision almost all media at high quality, low inconvenience, minimal risk, for free
Do you have a way of seeing your expenditures for the past year, categorized and summed? Use Mint or something similar. Take a day every couple years to go through and look at _all_ of them and determine which are simply extraneous, which you don’t endorse.
If you buy some weights and exercise at home, or exercise using your own body weight, you could save money and time! And maybe even exercise more, if going to the gym is a trivial inconvenience.
But yeah, living alone increases your expenses. The expenses per person then decrease again when you have a partner.
Totally agree about having weights at home. Besides the cost, one upside is there’s no energy barrier to exercising—I can take a 1-minute break from browsing the web or whatever, do a set, and go back to what I was doing without even breaking a sweat. A downside is it’s harder to get in the mindset of doing a full high-intensity workout for 45 minutes; but I think it’s a good tradeoff overall.
just a quick idea: make a 45-minute playlist of workout music?