We're not the same and I don't relate
July 2nd 2020
A recent study has come out explaining that money can buy you happiness. The approximate number is an income of 70k, you can make more, but there isn’t a much greater level of happiness, they say. The things around you just get nicer, in theory.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/how-much-money-you-need-to-be-happy-according-to-wealth-experts.html
They’re not wrong.
The thing is that people will tell you that money creates its own problems. I’d say how we spend money is the problem source. In my late teens and early twenties I went from job to job. In each instance I made more money and I ended up spending more money. It was only during a period of a couple of years that I contracted that I had good savings habits.
The difference between a salary job (false sense of security), and contract work (you really won’t have this job long), was that the money from contracting was and still can be a wild ride. On one job, for a few months I’d be scraping the barrel and making $700 every two weeks. I’d then go six months making $3000 a month. It was a wild ride. In addition to not knowing what I might be making in the following months, I also had to deal with being unemployed for weeks or months at a time.
You always had the choice to hold out till you hit your number. A lot of people did that. They’d retire in increments. In this instance you’d declare to yourself (and anyone around you that), there was no way you were going to accept anything less than 80k a year. At that point it was just up to you to make do till those big ticket offers came in.
I saved a lot of money during those contracting years. It was the only time in my twenties when I had really great financial habits. I eventually left contracting, it was too unstable for me. The financial uncertainty felt agonizing, though I never really struggled with managing my money, outside of anxiety. In addition to that, as a contractor you feel like a second class citizen, put that on top of being a minority and it really was a bummer socially.
The way to tame money is to not spend it.
The thing with not spending money is that our entire society is built on consumption. If you can afford it, why aren’t you doing it? Why aren’t you drycleaning your clothes? Why would you clean your house? Why are you driving an old car, that is ugly, sometimes needs repairs and is paid off? Why indeed?
We are seduced by the now, with little heed of the fact that we’re all time travelers with capsules likely to land us into barren futures.
Taking a small portion of your income and saving that for retirement and making it rain with everything else you earn is normal.
When I got to my thirties I was really overcome with anxiety about finances. I had a salaried job, the economy was a rollercoaster. I had to change my life. I started with paying off debt, it took years of conditioning and change to get there. I truly did not suffer while doing it.
Once I got to my later thirties I realized that my identity was tied into my profession and ability to make money. That made me aghast. So I doubled down. The debt was gone, but I wasn’t saving in any significant way. So I had to push harder to be better at that. And I did, I started to save, but you first have to bring down your entire cost of living if you want to really save. And I did. Then I took all of my savings and started to invest. Investing is saving, but you do take your liquidity and turn it into an object, whether it is stock, or a rental house. I again had no money, but now I was able to live on an income of 22k a year. This was far less than the nearly 100k I was making before.
I didn’t have any money though. My cost of living was greatly reduced. My money had a long term mission that was serving me, but there was really just some emergency money around. Again, no one was starving. I still had family vacations. We still went out to dinner.
End part 1.
