Budgeting and Achieving the Lifestyle You Want

Source: Forbes

 I was recently talking to a friend of mine (yes, I myself have noticed that most of my posts beings referencing a conversation with someone or something of the sort, but this is how my ideas for this blog happen to be born: through conversations or events in my life), and we were talking about budgeting, keeping to budgets and how people relate to that. My friend if a young lady still, and she's not in a very good financial position inspite of all her efforts and having a very good job. From what I see and what she tells me, she's the one working to keep her family afloat, as neither of her parents have a stable income, or a good enough one, and her one sibling is not working.

I insist: she's quite young, she's barely in her middle twenties (I met her some years back through a book club I used to be part of).

I believe her parents don't have higher education, and both struggle with some mild forms of handicap, which might limit their chances to access higher paying jobs. One of them also prefers to be an enterpreneur in an industry that's either seasonal or don't get much of a demand nowadays, and the other is currently unemployed as they were laidoff by the company in a "sizing down" strategy. Inspite of that, the family has a tendency of living day-to-day and are fond of hosting get togethers, parties or to throw special celebrations of holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, that all in all consume a lot of resources. She is, at a certain point, aware that her family's relationship to money may not be the best, and she tries to manage her own expenses and income in a better way, but time and again she ends up going into these big spending events, and then budgets and resources to loans in order to "break even". And this is what got me thinking.

My friend suffers a lot of stress and has health issues stemming from many sources in her life, and I can't help to wonder if part of it also comes from the weight placed on her young shoulders. She does have dreams that would populate a Pinterest-worthy moodboard, with achieving independence by her 30th birthday, living by her own, in another country and so on. But are these only dreams meant to stay in the moodboard of the year, or are these achievable dreams? And if so, how could she achieve them?

The capability to achieve our dreams depend on a lot of factors, and sadly not everybody can achieve them all, and in some cases people are not willing to take the steps needed to get on the road to achieve some of their dreams, for various reasons that make sense in their own realities. Setting aside the fact that nobody shall judge what others do with their lives just from what they see from the outside, these would be some considerations one could make when setting goals that one really wants to achieve:

1. Be aware of your resources and your commitments

It's nice to dream with being a millionaire or a princess or a super successful business owner, but where do we really stand? This doesn't mean that you can't dream with being rich if you are poor, but that you need to be realistic and consider what do you have at your disposal to achieve that goal. Sometimes dreams stay just as dreams because we think that just by dreaming things and manifesting them, they will magically come true. And be aware that I am a witch and I believe in magick.

Some dreams will take more time, more effort, and there is a chance that some dreams will depend on other people, and those we can't control.

Then, the other part of the equation is about what claims are on our resources. If you have debts, dependant family members, commitments that occupy your time, energy and resouces and leave you little space to maneuver or none at all. Sometimes it's not even something you could leave behind (in a sudden, self-centered, unemotional scenario), but it's something that goes along with you, like a condition or a sickness that requires treatment, or that keeps you from getting other sources of income to improve your situation.

This doesn't mean that, if any of these factors are present, you should give up your dreams, but rather that you must factor them to make better decisions.

2. Consider what you can actually achieve and how much time you would need for it

Once you have a clear picture of what your resources are and what are the claims on those resources, you can start moving around the pieces and deciding what would you need to achieve your dreams. The first step is a kind of reality check where we can actually see what do we have to work with to get what we want.

In the case of my friend, she tells me she wants to move out of her parents' home by the time she's 30. In order to do that, she should be considering things like where she wants to live, whether she wants a house of her own or to rent a place, where and how much could she spend on that, how much would she need for appliances, furniture and how much the utilities could dent her resources, but then also, she needs to consider if she would be still supporting her parents and her sibling, or if she's comfortable letting them go and allowing them to live within their means. In a cold fashion, many readers could think that yes, she should let her parents fend for themselves and maybe learn the hard way that they can't spend more than what they make, but if we are honest, that's not how families (or many families) work, and so, in the end, my friend could be struggling with supporting two households on one salary.

This should give her pause and make her consider what can she achieve, and which pieces can she move (say, talk to her parents that she does intend to move out, that she won't be able to help them anymore, so maybe they should start working on their spending priorities), which depend on her, which depend on others, over which she has control to change and which are out of her reach.

These calculations could help her design a timeline for her dreams. For example, let's say that she does talk to ger parents and her sibling and they agree not to burden her income up to an x%. She also realizes that she could do better if she has a degree in something marketable, or a particular certification, or maybe she would have a better chance abroad with companies that pay better her skills. If she decides to take that road, she would have to commit to getting that degree, enrolling into the academy to get that certification or start to apply to a work visa as well as to positions in companies in the country or countries she had found would pay her better.

3. Make a Plan

Finally, when the resources, the commitments and the possible requirements to get to our dreams are identified, and we can see what are our possibilities, we can start making plans. These plans include not only budgets, but also schedules and task lists of what we need to achieve our dreams. This is the point where we map out our road towards our dreams.

Now, plans can be the point where all comes crumbling down, if we make unrealistical plans. For this, not only do we need to have discipline, but we need to know ourselves and know not only how much leeway do we need, but also what do we need to stay motivated. Let's not make plans that assume we can save up the 99% of our income, that we will live from eating the grass of the park and will never get sick or have an emergency. Let's not pretend either that we can live a life that  consists constantly of days of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of study, 4 hours of side hussles and 4 hours of sleep.

To make a realistic plan you need to understand yourself. Watch yourself, check how much energy you have what can you realistically achieve in a week, how much you spend and how that changes for a period of time. Study yourself as you would study a research subject. Once you know yourself, your habits, your needs and your patterns, make pilot tests: try out different habits, the ones you have devised to achieve your goals, and see how you feel about them, how realistic, achievable they are. Don't worry, there's no failure there, this is just a test. Try it out six weeks, evaluate the results and tweek it, when you need to.

Maybe savings is easier to try out, but studying isn't. Well, check out some of the classes you intend to take, and do a mock-try. Go to the campus, stay there reading, maybe you can get into the class just to listen to it (ask the instructor for permission first!), and calculate the commuting time, and how tired you are after. To test out online classes, try watching videos on the subject of your interest, on the same lenght of the class, at the same time, and see how you feel. There are ways to run tests before you commit, all you need is a dab of creativity.

When you find a test-plan that works for you, recalculate your steps, how much resources you would need to invest, how much time it would take you, how you can take advantage of that time, and set it in motion.

To give you an idea, I recently decided that it might be time for me to move to another company to work. I do have a good income, but I feel that I could do more and that I could also be better paid for what I can do. Now, I still have some debts which I would like to pay off before I move to another job (as there is the chance that the entry level job of the next place I go to won't pay me as much as my current job initially). I made the calculations, and I came to the conclusion that, with a budget plan I have devised and I have already tried out, I could be debt free in two years. This means that I'll stay in the company at least two years (more if things change and a better position in here opens up). I won't use up that time just working and paying up my debts, but rather I decided to use those two years I have given myself to improve my CV. I'm checking jobs I would be interested in and looking at the skills they require. I write those down and I have started looking up free tutorials online to acquire those skills. Yes, I could go with paid courses, but why spend money on courses for things I could get for free to get the basics and then spend the money on more advanced classes? At least, that's my logic: now I place my priority on cancelling my debts, staying on top of my budget to be able to affort all my acquired commitments and then getting all the priming, basic knowledge I can on the things I want to add to my CV.

In two years, when I'm debt free and with a fuller, better equipped CV, I'll start the job searching process, hopefully allowing me to get to a position that would be higher and better paid than the one I could get right now. It could take me time, because I would get older and I'm already of an age that's not so desirable for many companies, or at least for certain positions, but I would be still, in a better position in two years, if I stick to my plan.

It could still end up in nothing, my plan could fail and I could remain where I am, with the same position, but this plan won't ruin me, won't require me to take risks I could otherwise avoid, and yet still it has a better chance to get me to where I want to go than if I sat on my butt mopping and dreaming of one day being in a better place.