Here We Are: A Penny Closer

Posted on August 23, 2007 by Melissa
Filed Under Psychology, Reflection

My husband and I have never been the frugal type.

I never saved any of my earnings. I spent it on all sorts of gotta-have-it items that mean nothing to me now and really meant very little to me even then. I didn’t really think of savings unless it had to do with buying something expensive. The only future forward thinking I seemed to have involved figuring out how I was going to pay my cards that month.

After graduating from college I started my first salaried position. I wasn’t earning a fortune but it was more than I had ever earned before and I felt like I should be able to buy nicer things. My need to consume indiscriminately only seemed to gain steam as I entered adulthood.

I know my story is not unique. I’m sure many young adults don’t think about the future when it comes to spending money - that appears to come with the territory when we lack maturity and the feeling of mortality. The watchword at the time was instant gratification.

I had no idea how to really handle my money. The bills would mount up and I would face the fact that I couldn’t spend as much. I would cut back to pay the cards down but I still didn’t actually change. I just temporarily bought less stuff. And although the act of buying less stuff was an accomplishment, my fundamental attitude about money hadn’t changed. And thus the cycle continued: spending too much, having the credit card bill sky rocket, cutting back to pay it down, rinse, repeat.

My husband also wasn’t a saver although he had more restraint than I had throughout college and beyond. Even though he wasn’t budgeting or tracking how he spent his money he was still generally moving in a positive direction. He was doing some of the right things, like contributing to 401K, but he wasn’t monitoring his financial health or researching the best deals. He was just coasting along, enjoying the scenery.

When we fell in love our bad habits rubbed off on one another. Collectively, we had no idea how to budget and really didn’t have any desire to attempt to. We were quite content living outside our means and had no idea how much we were really spending. It wasn’t until we faced our first challenge as a married couple that we actually started to think about how we were living and our financial situation.

I suspect that I’m not alone. Maybe it takes a challenge, whether that is hitting a credit card limit, a new or changing relationship, or a specific desire that seems out of reach, to wake us up from this sort of auto-pilot spending pattern.

When we sat down and finally examined our bills we realized that there was no way we could reach our goal of moving into a new home the way we were spending. Technically, we couldn’t even afford to live in our current home, never mind a newer one! It was crushing. Things had to change. We had to change.

It certainly has been a journey so far. We have found that through making informed decisions and simply being aware of how we spend our money we have been able to make great strides in improving our quality of life and ability to save.

No, we aren’t completely debt free and no, we aren’t in that new home yet.
But after the changes we have made, we will be.

We still worry about money, but it is a different kind of worry now. We are empowered by being frugal and managing our finances instead of feeling, for lack of a better word, oblivious. The confidence we have gained in knowing we have a level of control over our money, rather than the other way around, is really invaluable.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, get the posts via email, read more about the blog in our about page, or browse our archives. Thanks for visiting!