For an example: I had an issue with always being in a food-scarce state, where I basically needed to hit the grocery store everyday buying overpriced under-portioned stuff and spending a fortune to have basically nothing in the cupboards and fridge or being depressed I had no supplies and just ordering food.
I broke down and decided I needed to get and start using my Costco membership and that I could have whatever I wanted as long as I put every item down in a spreadsheet type doc and came up with a rough estimate for how many of each I needed each month and factored tax i to the multiplyer so I could adjust and always have the total cost for everything that would be my groceries.
But I took it even further and now every subscription, bill, discretionary and vices, and more expensive longer-term items all get roughly budgeted for based on their lifecycle. So an annual subscription I anticipate keeping gets saved for out of each paycheck, something that lasts 2 months gets amortized over 4 paychecks generally.
Everything is overbudgeted and real liberal so even if I don’t have that expense that month or ever and its out of date, I still end up benefitting by saving for it and now I anticipate slowly transitioning all my monthly subs I cant yet afford annual and paying more for towards once a year with a discount and it not littering my records with the need for monthly entries.
Now all my accounts except savings $0 out at the end exactly each month so it will be immediately obvious what the surplus is and what I am able to save, and also leverage that towards further optimizations as the opportunity arises.
Its like a complete paradigm shift for me and I think I’ve stumbled on to my new groove haha. Its also forced me to be realistic and realize I can’t save money when I’m not planning for the actual human needs and factors involved. Savings cannot be an the expense of my physical and material well-being, I will not tolerate that long term without sabatoging myself
[Knock-on benefits]
- budget for expensive bag of catfood per month and cat litter but won’t go through nearly that much so that can become an adhoc cat medical insurance/vet visit/medical and supply fund + my emergency medical fund 😅
- can subtly tweak the quantities to allow accumulation of supplies without severe effect or detriment of the general budget. It will almost certainly be covered by other items not requiring replenishment
- since larger over-time expenses rarely overlap, can use the savings to apply to pressing needs or unexpected emergencies without ever really having an impact since they will have been covered several times over by redundancies created by savings for other expenses that are similarly ongoing
Earning more than I spent. It’s really not a complex science. In fact this whole question reminds me of the weight-loss debate.
For context, I’ve been working for a couple of decades, never been highly paid, rarely even worked full time, and it’s been at least 15 years since I had the slightest money issue.
The critical variable is self-discipline. I know this is not a popular opinion. I also understand that there are societal factors that feed into all this, and that questions of virtue and vice are basically irrelevant. But it’s true nonetheless. We do not live in a society of material scarcity. If you have an income, basically any income, and you can find a way to control your needs, then you will quickly escape survival mode.
If you are white and privileged enough to be on lemmy, sure.
So many privileged people get into financial trouble due to ignorance or lack of discipline. Seen it, done it myself, and recovered.
But poverty is real for many people who don’t have the same advantages. I can’t victim blame people for their own poverty.
Self-discipline is not the issue. “Just use some of your extra money differently” already means you’re dealing with a person who doesn’t have those issues.
I think its most important to ensure you have what you need and plan for that intelligently. Like I said, I can have basically what I want I just need to budget it in and take out all the survival mode shenanigans where I wing it and wheel and deal to the effect I’m spending on nothing because there’s no trail laid out for me to follow. I’m eating less and less crap now that I have this sorted out and I’m projecting lots of easy little surpluses I can store away sustainably as I go forward