Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes and lives? Every month a group of six bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, thoughts, with posts based on specific prompts. It’s been so interesting over the years to see the different ways each of us interpret the topics.

This month we’re tackling MONEY. How to manage it, how to save it, how to handle it. This is not a “how to” as much as a “this is how I did,” and you can take from it what you will, or not 🙂

Saving and budgeting. I don’t know that this is a subject anyone should be looking to ME for for advice, ha ha. I’ve had a few brief, shining moments in my life of decent budgeting and saving, but…

Here goes nothing.

Most of my life I’ve been pretty willy nilly with money and spending. If I HAD money, I could SPEND money…and I’d worry about tomorrow tomorrow.

DO NOT DO AS I DO.

About ten years ago I was working with a young girl who was saving up money with her fiance for their wedding. And she was using this cash-based envelope system. Right off the bat I was like GRR cuz I am not a cash girl. But I’d also been in debt for quite awhile and wanted out so…I thought I’d give it a try. The basic premise was each time you got paid, you’d CASH your check (ugh I hate this part so much), or like me, cuz I pay bills online, first I’d pay my actual bills: rent, phone, etc…then I’d take out the cash that was left…and put it in these envelopes marked SAVING/INVESTING/SPENDING. Now at that point in my life, there wasn’t much left after paying bills, but I wanted to go through the motions even if just $10 was going in each envelope, just to get in the habit of doing it. So, $10 to savings, $10 to investing, $10 to spending. If you had more money left after paying bills, you could have more specific envelopes: DINING OUT, RETIREMENT, CLOTHING, etc. But most paychecks (bi-weekly) I was lucky to have $30 leftover.

Those were lean years.

The theory (I believe) is that with the actual paper cash (vs internet FREE MONEY) and the envelopes, you could better keep track of what amount of money was going towards what.

And while I DID save/invest/spend reasonable small amounts, I only stuck with this system for about a year because I just don’t shop in person…I needed my money online…and even my savings and investments (paltry as they were), were online.

Then in 2018, after enough of my debts (sizable credit card debt – about $30,000 – from years when I was unemployed) had been paid down – oh, an aside here – in paying down debt I USUALLY follow the “pay off the smallest amounts first so you get that little I DID IT RUSH and then that small amount of payment you’d been making there can be added to another bill, helping to pay IT down faster, resulting in another I DID IT, lather rinse repeat” method – my New Year’s Resolution was to get my finances in order.

One BIG thing I did right away that year, that I do Two Thumbs Up Recommend, was using a saving/investment app called Stash. I’m sure there are other similar apps, this just happened to be the one I used and it helped me So Much. It does attach to your checking account (I know some people are leery of that, that’s up to you), and I was able to set amounts and a schedule for it to withdraw money from my checking and add it to my savings/investment accounts through the app. In the very beginning, I was only doing $5 per paycheck, ha ha…cuz I was not really sure how much I could afford…but when I saw I was managing without that little bit, I kept upping it up by $5-10/per month, until eventually, probably wihin a year, I was putting $100/month towards savings and $100/month towards investments.

Re the investments: you could choose specific things to invest in, or you could tell the app if you wanted to be cautious, moderate, or aggressive with your investment, and the app would do it for you. I ended up doing half moderate, half items of my own choosing, based slightly on emotion (ha ha) and slightly on the teensiest bit of research…but over the years the things I chose just happened to do well.

At the same time as using Stash, I was also moving $100 into my bank savings each month from my paycheck…this gave me a little more immediate access if needed (Stash takes like 3 business days to transfer to your checking account), so that was growing as well. I also was adding the twice-yearly “extra” checks to my Stash savings, as well as about half of my tax returns.

So from January 1, 2018 til February 2019, I had raised/saved almost $8,000. From NOTHING. I realize that to many people this is peanuts, but I have never in my LIFE saved money. The only time I have ever had any sizable amount of money on hand, was when my mother passed away and we sold her house. But I had done this all on my own and I was Very Proud. Without the automated app that NEVER would have happened.

AND THEN…I found out I had to move…and the more expensive apartment I was moving to also required first and last month’s rent AND one month’s rent as security. That was almost $5,000 and cut my wonderful savings down by more than half. Sadface.

That took the wind out of my sails for a bit…I had to cut back a lot on my monthly savings/investment due to higher rent, and then I just went to hell in a handbasket for over a year. The same principle as “I ate one cookie so I may as well eat the whole box” applied and I bought a LOT OF STUFF THAT YEAR. Clothes, especially. I was doing a monthly blog post at that time called “What I Bought This Month” and when I think back to the amount I was spending, OOFAH.

I continued using Stash for lower amounts, and gradually the amount built up again, slower than before, but…at least it was going in the right direction.

A year and a half later in November 2021, when I finally figured out I could move to South Korea on a student visa IF I could pay my own tuition (I think it’s around $12,000 for the full 18-month program) AND save/raise the $10,000 I needed to show in my bank account at the time I applied both to the school and to immigration for the visa. AND go with about $5,000 cushion for spending and emergencies. AND zero balance on my credit cards. That was a lot of IFs for someone who’d only ever saved up $8,000 in my life.

So, I said to myself *IF* I could raise all this money in time, I would go. And if ever there was a motivation for me to whip my money into shape, this was it.

I stopped doing almost everything fun (not EVERYTHING, but I cut out a LOT), I was back to putting $500/month into savings (I put the investments on hold for a bit), and ALL my “extra” paychecks and tax return money. And fortunately, in the years since the envelope budget system, I’d gotten MOST of my credit cards paid off, and I was down to the last one. So a bunch of money that used to go towards credit card debt paying was now able to go into that last card and savings…so things started happening pretty fast.

ALSO, I’ll say this. A friend once asked me, don’t you wish you’d started all this saving a long time ago, you could have been living so much easier all this time. But that’s not how it was. Ten years ago my salary was lower and debt was higher…so there was very little leftover for savings after making all my monthly payments. Each year I got a small (I think it was 3%) cost of living increase, I never got a “raise,” but over time the COL’s got larger and my monthly payments got lower as things were paid off. So ten years ago saving a lot each month was just not an option.

Anyway. I paid off that last card in August of 2022. I WAS CREDIT CARD DEBT FREE! It was amazing and I was SUPER proud of myself. I’d had credit card debt (lots) since 2009.

Three days later my car broke down to the tune of almost $2000. A month later, the same. Two months later, something else. My job had a wonderful “car repair loan” policy where they’d pay for the repair, then deduct monthly payments from your paycheck to pay it back…but there was a cap…and I surpassed it so had to start putting things back on the card.

ANYWAY, I managed to get to $24,000 just 20 months after making the decision to try to go. And while I didn’t EXACTLY reach my goal, I came Pretty Damn Close. Close enough to proceed with my plans.

And now I’ve been here six months, and my spending has been a bit willy nilly again, haha, cuz so many things are so much less expensive than the US…but there have been some unanticipated expenses – like a tutor, and the fact that I’ve kept my US phone number…and now I really need to sit myself down and work out a budget for myself.

I’ll let you know what I come up with when I do!

I do think budgeting is very personal. Only you can decide what method works best for you, and what expenses are most important to you. I think having an exciting goal is extremely motivating, more so than just “I want a 6-month emergency cushion,” although if that works for you, great.

But I DO think that an automated system is SO helpful. Otherwise you have to make hard decisions every month, “do I want to put money into savings…or do I want that pretty new coat??” With an automated system the money is just whisked away, out of your easy grasp…and out of sight, out of mind. So I do really recommend Stash (not sponsored, ha ha), or an app like that.

AND…even someone as bad at savings as I am…starting late in life…can still save enough to have a wonderful adventure…or add to a retirement fund…or whatever floats your boat. All the financial people are like START WHEN YOU’RE 30! START WHEN YOU’RE 20! PARENTS, START YOUR CHILDREN’S RETIREMENT FUND WHEN THEY’RE IN THE WOMB! Making it seem like if you DON’T start then that you’re just SOL, it’s too late, so sad, too bad. But no. You can make a difference at any age.

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE AT ANY AGE.

Make sure to check out my wonderful friends’ posts to see what financial tips or stories they may have…

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris is taking a little sabbatical and we miss her very much…….Iris’ Original Ramblings <-
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie had to step away to take care of LIFE…we hope to see her back someday Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own