Controlling Expenses

Don't I get to spend more money after getting a job?

After getting a job, there will be a significant change in your financial situation. If your parents were well to do, your financial situation must have deteriorated significantly since you feel odd asking them for pocket money and your salary seems to get over before it even started. If you struggled to afford an eduction then you probably have money in your pocket but then again maybe you have a lot of responsibilities and your salary seems too small to fulfill all of them. Blessed is the odd standout who actually has more money just after getting her first job.

Controlling expenses is a hard thing to write about. This is because while the savers are all similar (they dont spend on anything), each spindrift is spends in his or her own way. So rather than trying to control expenses I will talk about something else.

What do you do with your time?

This is probably a strange question to ask in a personal finance blog. But spend a few minutes thinking about it and you will realize that it is a very important question. In fact, some psychologists believe that it is THE CENTRAL question of our existence. But this question is even more relevant for people who have recently got a job.

The reason this is important is that after getting a job, life changes significantly. You become - or are supposed to become - more mature, responsible and capable of taking your own decisions. Before taking a job, life was structured - often by others. College and classes decided when to study. You probably had a large group of friends with much social interaction. This group decided what to do with your free time. But after getting a job, your groups would probably have become much smaller. You will be surrounded by your professional contact most of whom are significant older. There might be a few "freshers" in your work place and a few college friend who you are luck live / work near the same place you do.

In other words, while you didn't have to do much to pas time in your college, now on one hand you have a job which exhausts you and on the other hand you have not much idea what to do in your spare time. It will be worth your time to write down ten or twelve things that you do - or should do when you have free time.

Where is this going along?

If you have actually done the exercise in the last line, you will realize that more often than not, you do not have an idea let alone a plan. And as a result you go with the flow  making decisions at the last moment. What typically happens when we do so is that rather than doing things that give us real satisfaction, we go for things that are easy and give us momentary satisfaction.

For instance, you may like traveling of hiking but that is not an option at 4:00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon (because you got up at 2:00, because you slept at 4:00 a.m., because you were watching a rerun of Friends, because you had no idea what to do on a Saturday night - you get the idea...). On the other hand, if you had planned something a couple of days ago, you might have slept earlier and got up at 6:00 in the morning to beat the traffic and visit a nearby hillsite.

I have noticed that when we "go with the flow" somehow the decisions are very "costly". I think we are more vulnerable to advertisement and all the glamorous things that are heavily advertized are costly.

So what do I do?

Now spend more time trying to imagine what you really want to do with your time - it could be education, hobby, hiking, traveling, joining a community or cause or so on. It is very unlikely to be shopping and eating out. Further, you will realize that there are lots and lots of ways to do this things at low costs.

More importantly, you are doing things that you really like so money spend on them is well spent; on the other hand money spent because some crafty commercial conned you into buying something you didn't want and couldn't afford will make you miserable.