And I thought I was the only one that did this before. During my early teen years I thought to myself that since so many people I knew kept complaining about not having enough money during times when they truly needed it that I would have to think a little different in terms of an approach on how I would spend and save money. For example, at that age people would say spend everything at once or save maybe 20% of what they got. At first I was thinking of a spend half of what you get and save the other half approach, but I thought it would have enticed me to spend money just for the sake of spending it.
What I decided to do was that if there was something that I wanted to buy or spend money on which wasn’t really necessary, whatever the cost of that purchase was I would have to put away the exact same amount in my savings. For example, if something was $50 that means I would need $100 to buy it as I would need to put $50 in the savings as well, which I couldn’t touch afterwards. This obviously made it harder for me to make purchases and at the same time it was motivating as well as I could visually see how much money I was saving up as a result. A quick example was since I got $20 every two weeks, if something was $30 it would literally take me about 6 weeks just to be able to buy that.
It helped in a lot in other ways too as it helped to prevent me from making bad impulse purchases and in a way it truly placed me in a position where when I bought something that means I could truly afford to do so as oppose to having nothing left afterwards. While I don’t do this nowadays since it is more about return of investment and efficiency, I still carry on with the same type of mindset in terms of if you have say $1000 left and that item is exactly $1000, having zero left afterwards in my mind means that I can’t afford it for the most part and will only buy it if I had more funds as I don’t want to just get by.