Today I was having a conversation with a person where one of the topics was how money can make people do things you never expect. I then showed him an example in the past where I had to take a childhood friend to court as I loaned him tens of thousands of dollars which he denied. At the time I never thought people would sacrifice a long-time friendship in an effort over money. I actually created a mini documentary/report of this and so he saw all the things such as the cheques I wrote him where one was like ten thousand dollars. That then brought a comment on how the heck I had so much money in the first place as it’s not like I get paid ten thousand dollars a day or something ridiculous like that.
I was then saying how it simply comes down to saving money. He was still in disbelief of all that though as his facial expression seemed like he thought I must secretly have like a hidden business empire or something. Quite honestly it goes back to the notion on how it’s not how much you make but how you spend it. Cause in a lot of cases I find that people actually make a ton of money in their daily lives. However, the way people spend it makes it seem like it is simply not enough.
I used today as an example where when I met up with him he really wanted to go to a restaurant and so we did. He was a bit worried if he actually had enough to pay for a decent meal where he then started to count how much money he had. The first thing that came to my mind was that we should get out of there as if you are tight on funds then a restaurant should be one of the last places you should ever be visiting. But we ended up staying and I ended up paying more than my share.
I started to try and put some things in perspective for him where his meal was over ten dollars and it didn’t seem that much as he scarfed it all down pretty fast. He then walked with me to the stores I was visiting as part of my documentation for the day and I was showing him how you can pretty much make meals for a couple of days with that amount of money. He was also floored with like my one dollar budget site that I used as examples on how much you can buy for one dollar too.
Try adding up that habit of dining out as an example versus cooking your own meals. It truly does add up. Even with a fairly meager salary you may be surprised at how large your bank account can get. You just have to actually save to realize it. Once you build that confidence too it’s just like a snowball that keeps getting bigger. Of course that snowball can go in the reverse too if you are insistent in spending a lot always.
A key too I think is that you should be learning to save by adjusting your lifestyle habits to spend money in an efficient way as opposed to like torturing yourself where it’s like you have to just not do anything period. Would be like the different between finding a good lifestyle diet that consistently keeps you healthy versus just not eating at all to avoid gaining weight.