I have always had the mentality of trying to save as much as possible which means spending as less money whenever I can. I always had this habit of treating my safety number as my zero per se. For example, having something like two thousand dollars in a bank is actually when I would worry where for most people they only feel that anxiety once they actually have nothing. Even for video games with some kind of currency system I always have a habit of having a safety net of sort before spending money.
So when I recently saw someone who literally was living with zero dollars in their bank account it was just so shocking to see how the person is only starting to worry now. I would of thought at minimum only having say one hundred dollars would be their emergency alert mode per se. But because now the person was at zero dollars they actually started to do things such as being frugal to get back to a semi comfortable amount.
So if you think about it in many ways it’s like if the person changed their “panic mode” to a higher minimum amount they could realistically put themselves in a good financial position. You know they can do it too as they follow through when they really need to at zero. I know for myself just like a video game when you at least always see a decent amount of savings you tend to want to do better and make it bigger too.