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Comment by tehCorner | Hacker News Reader

> Frugality inertia: a lifetime of good savings habits can’t be transitioned to a spending phase.

Coming from a poor family and knowing the hard way the issues of not having money I've been obsessed with saving money since I got my first paycheck 8 years ago and I always thought "at the point I would earn current salary + x I will start enjoying life more and stop worrying about money" but that never happened.

8 years have passed and I still have the same thoughts despite earning 15 times more and having no financial problems, my mind just makes it very difficult whenever I have to spend money on something.

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Similar. I left home at 15 made my own way. I saved 95% of what I made - drank powdered milk, worked 7 days a week for 15 years multiple jobs, side jobs (flip houses, production company). But I set a goal so, unlike my grandmother, who never stopped fearing the return of the Great Depression, I could stop. I retired in my mid-thirties and now I study languages and write and travel, but I don't buy stuff. Maybe if you set an achievable goal it will help.

Do you feel satisfied in that series of decisions? This was something I started doing in my twenties, but am glad it didn't continue, despite having some major financial difficulties now (though I don't have much control over that anyway). Do you feel like your travel experiences offer you more substance than any possessions would, and do you feel like language learning is a fruitful use of time?

Yes. I'm learning Russian, traveling all the time, studying philosophy, working with a small think tank and I've become a black belt in Krav Maga. I hate stuff, don't miss it and learning a language has changed my writing, thinking and it's actually fun.

Out of curiosity, which think tank?

Thanks for answering, have two follow up questions. How do you differentiate between acquisition of intangible things like Krav Maga and Russian language, and tangible things; is the value you derive from exclusively engaging with them sufficient? Secondly—and this feels like an obvious one—do you feel like the social connections you've made along the way, in what appears to be a black and white intensity of lifestyle, are where you want them to be?

I enjoy travel, and don't have the resources to travel full-time, but at 30 I feel like if I were set up financially for it, my lack of relentless working has let me build a resilient group of relationships that I struggle to think would be around otherwise, and I'd be able to leave for a while without them suffering too much. Those two fulfillments strike me as diametrically opposed, but I always like to hear about other paths.

May I ask what did you think was your number or how did you come to a number?

I don't know that I have a problem spending money. I just don't want things.

Take cars, for instance. I can afford to buy a new car. My current car is old enough to have its own driver's license. But, why? It runs all right. It's solid. It has literally never let me down. I don't worry about it getting a dent. I don't worry about taking it on decent unpaved roads. Sure, it will die eventually, but until then, why would I replace it?

Or take vacations. I like vacations. But I don't need to fly to Vegas and stay at the Encore and drop a few thousand at the tables in order to feel like I had fun. I can have fun camping in the Mojave and never pay a dollar for a motel room. (I mean, I can see the point in a really nice hotel room from time to time...)

Or take eating out. I like good food, at least once in a while. But a good medium-to-high-end steak place is as far as I want to go. These Michelin starred places? I look at their menus, and I don't see anything that I actually want to eat.

For me, it's not that I'm still worried about money. It's that I don't have much of a taste for expensive things.

Yeah, similar here. It seems to make some people angry, it's like if I have money, it is my moral duty to spend it all immediately. But the things I want are surprisingly cheap. Even computers, were crazy expensive 30 years ago, but now they cost almost as little as books.

The expensive food, I think is not about the taste, but about getting dozen tiny pieces of food, each of them has a French name, and you always wait 10 minutes until they bring you the next bite. You pay for the feeling that many people have spent a lot of time and work preparing your food, even if the result is not really better. Probably other people enjoy that feeling; I don't.

It was a great experience for me traveling to a foreign land as an adult. One of my most valuable lessons came as the trip began to wind down, and I was left with a medium amount of money in that country's currency. I suddenly realized that this money was essentially going to become useless the moment we left. It wouldn't be enough to justify a trip to the bank to convert it, especially with the fees. I started buying anything I wanted, and some things I didn't. Anything I could spend this useless money on would be better than taking it back home with me.

As you might realize, there's quite a parallel to our lives here. At some point in your life, and it might be now, and it might not be until moments before the end, you will realize that all this money is useless to you. You'd trade literally all of it for another moment that matters. Do you want to have that realization when it's too late, or do you want to get started on that now?

To extend your analogy: All of us will return from that foreign land at some point.

Almost all of us will leave behind other traveling companions we care about who can use that money.

This is me and I struggle with it on a regular. We are quite comfortable (on my single salary I can cover mortgage, private care for my kids, and good food), but I feel behind -- because I came from a poor family who scraped on a regular. My parents still work their fairly simple factory jobs as they need to pay off their debts (albeit they are below 65)

What I'm trying this year is ensuring I can allocate a certain amount to savings (automatic withdrawal) and then treating the leftover money as "free to spend"

I don't know if this will work, as once I see that excess cash I think "Ah, let's use this to pad the emergency fund..." but I need to begin training the mind to be more comfortable with spending.

I *strongly* encourage you to pick a budgeting program and stick with it. I say this as someone who comes from perhaps more meager means than most in this thread and I now am in a similar position as you.

I use YNAB but I'm sure any will do. Essentially, I give every dollar a "job", whether that is to be the next car insurance payment 6 months from now or for our vacation fund. I know what money I have and where it's going. I have tracked every single dollar I've spent for about the last 10 years, less some petty cash.

I still have financial insecurity worries that likely stem from my childhood and I doubt they'll ever fully go away (see: people who grew up during the Great Depression), but I can allow myself to spend now and do so confidently.

I think you're right. I've mostly stayed away from budgeting apps. I'm already quite busy with work and parenting two young kids, but it may be the best way to train the mind. Thank you

I have the same problem, I don't track my spending but have money automatically plowed into different investments and am generally frugal. Been looking into money manager ex and home bank as foss softwares. Mint, quicken and ynab are popular but I don't want a cloud solution where I have to pay a subscription fee, I mostly just want transactions with labelled data so I can see where the money goes.

Personally, I realized that I was wasting a lot more in opportunity cost by trying to make all the various non-subscription solutions work for me (and writing my own for awhile), and I'm much happier now paying ynab a yearly pittance instead of spending all that time on something without much actual value to me. (And by switching to a subscription model they've been able to improve the product much more quickly than they were with the classic version.)

I also work a lot and have two young kids. Going through and updating the budget each week or two is one of the main things I do to relax :)

> for our vacation fund.

Well most people with the mentality GP is describing cannot get themselves to do this in first place. not sure if this is a budgeting problem. Ppl save obsessively because they think they might need that money for an unavoidable future expense even though they can't quite tell what that might be.

You don't have to spend the "free to spend" money, and you shouldn't feel bad for not spending it.

Maybe collect the unspent amounts into an "Emergency Fun" fund, so you can dip into it if you have a crisis related to fun (gaming device breaks, see something really cool that you want to have or do, etc)

Good luck with that "Free to Spend" category. It just turned into emergency fund 2.0 for me. One thing that allowed me to spend some money is the idea of diversifying my savings by purchasing assets. Rather than let Emergency fund 2.0 sit in an account as cash burning a hole in my pocket why not buy an asset. This could be an apartment, a collectible, a storage facility, etc. For me this feels like saving and spending at the same time.

It’s possible it’s not a problem, I’d be inclined to give yourself a break. A lot of the “essentials” we’re supposed to splurge on (big house, cars, expensive food, etc) are often overrated when you look at it from a “does this make my life better” lens.

Investing in yourself - be that skills or life experiences - is worthwhile but you can do even that with a frugal slant.

You made an unconvincing point by reducing money to stereotypical 'expensive cars' . What about going on ski trip while your kids are still young and having a magical and memorable moments in life.

> What about going on ski trip while your kids are still young and having a magical and memorable moments in life.

That's a necessity.

> What about going on ski trip while your kids are still young and having a magical and memorable moments in life.

For trips, talk to friends from any background about their cherished memorable trips from their childhood and try to repeat what worked. Figure out what caused those childhood trips to be memorable. It is rarely expense from what I can tell.

Expensive trips are often social status signalling. Kids don’t need expensive trips, they won’t appreciate the sacrifices which could be frustrating, and you really need to be able to afford follow-on trips if it turns out your kids love it too much!

For one of my close friends, the family went camping, which was about the cheapest way to go away when I was young. She still loves it and she just bought a new tent (she is mostly careful with money, so even buying a tent is a notable purchase). She took her kids camping, so the good experiences were shared across generations.

Disclaimer: skier. But my childhood skiing was cheap club fields, with cheap gear. Working bee days at the club to work on the club field for a few days each summer. Social. Affordable for a working class family. New Zealand had more of an egalitarian frontier mentality to fun.

> Expensive trips are often social status signalling.

I would love to go to so nice destination with magical mountains in colorado than my local hill in wisconsin. I don't care about posting in on facebook or whatever.

Memories are not just for kids though. I would argue they are more for adults.

Sure there are yogis in Himalayas that perfectly content( or atleast pretend to) with no money.

someone said : all-life-rich person can learn being poor ; all-life-poor person cannot learn being rich..

my granddad would pick the best wooden board and cut some small piece he needed from the best part of it - even if in the middle.

My dad would pick the most-matching-possible board at-hand and cut some corner of it. Saving the rest for something..

i am torn between the two..

My parents are similar. They had a cash/coin business and would count everything by hand. My mom developed shoulder/neck problems. I repeatedly asked them if I could buy them a bill and coin counter. Eventually I just bought them.

They thanked me and wished I had done it 5 years sooner.

One problem is that my parents treat all spending the same - whereas I think spending to invest in their health or quality of life is a no brainer.

Ramit Sethi has good advice on learning to spend, geared towards those that "made it" but can't escape past habits

And What is this advice. I couldn't search for it with the keywords in your comment.

hey are you Indian by any chance? I've noticed this with my indian family and friends. They don't think they are any downsides to saving too much and only upsides. There isn't even a realization that there is something wrong with saving too much.

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