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Money Pet Peeves
One of my biggest pet peeves is people that don’t live within their means. I see it al the time on Twitter. People that can barely afford rent, and then they are spending $2000 on a MacBook Air. I just don’t get it. To me having a nice chunk of money in savings is important. It’s just nice knowing we would be fine for a while financially if something bad should happen.
I also hate when people spend money stupidly. Smoking is gross and bad for you, but mostly it’s expensive. I was talking with the wife the other day and we calculated that her parents probably spend $600-$800 on cigarettes a month. That is crazy. Her parents live in a run down trailer, they barely have a pot to piss in. Neither of them have good paying jobs, but they should be doing better than they are. They have no car or house payment, and no kids at home. I don’t know what kind of credit card debt they have, but I do know smoking and weekly trips to the casino can’t be helping.
Thankfully her parents are happy. They would drop everything in a second to help out one of their kids. They don’t care about material possessions. I often think I care too much about my material possessions. I often feel guilty that I am able to live in a nice house, have nice things, and more toys than any person really needs. I guess that’s the benefit of always being responsible, getting an education so I could get a good job, and not doing stupid things with my money.
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Saving Money
It was a pretty expensive December for us, with Christmas, my truck breaking down, and record snowfalls requiring a snowblower. Thankfully we have a nice chunk of cash is savings.
I think saving money is just as addictive as spending it. Back in my college years I had the problem of spending too much. I got into a little credit card debt. It wasn’t too bad, but bad enough that I learned my lesson. When we wanted to move into a house we couldn’t because of my credit cards. We settled for a mobile home and vowed to knock out the credit cards.
They have been paid off for quite a few years now, and we have been in our house for a year and a half. Now, every payday, I look forward to added more to our savings. It’s a great feeling to know that if something disastrous were to happen, we would probably be ok money wise.
I am not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I do plan of trying to put more money into our savings. I calculated that we put about 15% of our income into savings last year. My goal it to try and put 20-25% into savings this year.