Yes. It’s always a good question to ask yourself:

Would you rather be effective or be right?

Hey! I’m part of a trend!

Keeping it under 10-12k total. Biggest splurges so far are 1.5k custom tailored three piece suit and 1.6k for photographer to cover the entire day without hour limits. Food will be about half the total cost.

But grocery store flowers, digital invites, thrifted dress, basic rings, picnic area ceremony and restaurant rehearsal. No DJ. No alcohol. No florist.

1. A house is not an asset if it’s the one place you can live cost-free in retirement.
2. We all pay into the system with our taxes - including someone who earned enough to afford a home. Why should anyone not benefit from the taxes they paid?
3. Anyone can be sick and in long-term care as they age, including ourselves. As we age, we may not be able to keep working. Those costs add up fast in our healthcare system. And we don’t get to make those choices up front for ourselves or our families. The bills come months if not years later. No one says what you owe until it’s too late. Why should anyone pay a cost they weren’t told would be coming?

I can’t argue that the way the US provides many services based off wealth is fair - I believe we should have a universal system that we all benefit from. Why should someone making less than me get better services than me because my job offers worse insurance than they get? We should all benefit.

But, if the choice is that no one benefits or that of our current system. I’ll choose our current system. Because I don’t know if I’ll be the one on the other side 40 years from now.

Wait really?? That makes so much more sense 🤣

I’m dying now because that’s literally what I thought when my extended family says it.

What part of California?

Not quite an idiom but term of endearment: petit chou in French is little cabbage but is often used for young kids…

I’m not seeing it yet - but YNAB is my current approach and I adore it.

I used to approach it in a project my income for the month and then assign that money into categories and into a savings pool. It was a good spreadsheet. I liked it.

But I find the envelope system that YNAB uses extremely powerful. You can set your categories (and it encourages you to remember expenses that only come up once in a while and budget for them on a monthly basis) and then you use the money you CURRENTLY have to fund them. You assign every dollar a job. Which means I can totally splurge on a fancy dinner… But it means I might be pulling money I assigned to my ski pass out (I sound ridiculously entitled, sorry… the blog posts they have give better perspectives if you are starting from high debt or low income). And I don’t want to pull that money because I’ve been setting it aside slowly for months… So I don’t splurge on drinks and dessert or I suggest street tacos or cooking at home for my friends instead.

I think #2 is unrealistic for a lot of people… The other points aren’t bad.

Heehee. At least with money I can know exactly how I’m spending it. I hate the effort it takes to track calories and the level of associated uncertainty.

Not necessarily. You can have a budget at any income level. It just might mean facing the fact that your expenses are higher than your income. No one says a budget can’t show you how much your going into debt instead of how much your saving. My partner was there through his college. It’s just depressing so you are less likely to do it. I don’t know if I would stick to it.

But I think knowing where your money is going and where it is coming from is a key step in motivating yourself to make a change… either to fight for other opportunities or to change spending habits. And it also gives you visibility into what differences it makes on a weekly or monthly or yearly basis.

Envelope style budgeting:)

I’m going to reply to your comment… But check out the philosophy of You Need A Budget. One of their keystones is roll with the punches. If you go on a spending spree, you just acknowledge it, cover those categories with money from somewhere else (or have it be on a credit card where it’ll warn you youre going into debt).

… what were your goals?

Yeah - we set up chores on a Google task list (which is what we already use). I tried to make each room its own thing (and only have 1-2 tasks per room). He also uses a white board so I add things there too. Good note of not adding it all at once.

Living together is super challenging. (It’s overall going well. Im just grumpy atm.) I hope that medication and/or therapy will help make things easier for him.

My fiance was diagnosed recently but we didn’t have insurance to get started with treatment. Just the diagnosis has helped him figure out what parts of him aren’t just “not trying hard enough”. But to be honest, I’m really heartened when you talk about a clean house because I need that for my own anxiety and it takes him so much effort that it’s hard to ask it of him.

I used Libby. (Just go grab a local library card and see if you can dig up any old library cards from anywhere else you’ve lived… You can have multiple libraries linked.) Also great for audiobooks.