PP Mguire
Build Guru
- Messages
- 32,593
- Location
- Fort Worth, Texas
Re: Today I have...
I have done it since the time I moved out of my own house (4 years and counting) and even though I have been homeless, made my own home, all the way up to 5 bedroom house I still have had enough money to at least get by. Everything you have said basically just screams I don't want to grow up yet. Lock myself out? I can get into my house without a key. Car breaks down? I can fix it myself saving tons of labor money. If I can't afford to go out with friends, I don't. If they can't understand that you have important things to take care of then they aren't good friends are they? I have been poor the past 3 years and my friends understand that sometimes I can go out or other times we just chill here and still have fun. When I was younger I made the choice not to go to school which even though many opposed it turned out for the better. I don't have any debt from going to school to worry about. I can manage my money to where I can live by myself with a minimum wage job and still have enough to have fun. It's all in your priorities. My priority is to make all my bills as low as possible even if it means spending a bit of money to do so (drywall and insulate all windows to save on energy for example). Once those bills are done I think to myself, do we have enough for gas, storage, insurance, ect? Finally when that is done we take food in to account and then see what we have left over. I think we have pretty nice things considering and still have tons of fun with our friends. Oh, and we have a kid to think of too.I wouldn't say it's easy to manage. It's very hard to predict how much money you are going to need for a given time. Bills can be higher than expected, your car insurance may go up or down, electricity/gas prices might hike up 15% etc.
For me it's more a case of, spend my money on stuff I need/want, then get a call from my friend saying they are going into town on Friday to celebrate a friends birthday.. well that can easily cost £50/60/70 - unless I want to become very unpopular and say no.
What about if your car breaks down, that could cost hundreds. Maybe you will get locked out of your house one day and have too call a locksmith, that is going to cost hundreds again (they charge a fortune).
Saying "Don't spend more than you earn" is a very obvious statement to make, but it is noway near that easy to live up too unless you earn a lot or have nothing else to think about. I do try to live by that saying myself, I set myself a weekly budget. I allow myself to go over it if I need an expensive item, but then I don't spend anything for the next few weeks to make up for it. But in normal cases I budget to a strict £52/week and thats that.