Never ending story for many years

[leafar87]

Hey there!
A friend of mine recommended this forum to me so I hope that I'll get some help and advise to get out of this struggle which is bothering me from day to day and year to year.

Let me introduce myself to you shortly:
I am 29 years young and life in Germany (therefore sorry for my bad English. Never less I hope that you can understand me anyways). Since I can think I am struggling with financial problems and the inability to get along with my income.

My financial situation looks like following

Monthly income: 1,900.- € (net)
Fixed costs: 935.67 €
- Including insurances, child support, rent for my rental apartment, mobile phone contract, gym contract and so on
Retirement: 106.- €
Monthly savings: 190.-€ (10 % of income)
Left for spending for whole month: ~ 600.- €
- Spending includes groceries, gas and so on.

Depts
Credit Card: 700.- €
Loan of money: ~ 3,000.- € (taken just for consumption...)

Currently Saved
Instant access saving account: 1,350.- €
... sadly and disgraceful to say: that's all

I hope that I have provided all necessary financial information to you.

My problem is that I am not able to get along with my monthly income better with the money which is left for spending. I can't remember a day where I have not spend any cent. I spend every day some money. Most of the money gets away for stupid things. For example cigarettes, energy drinks, clothes which I literally wear only one time, books which I want to read but In the end I don't even open them, decoration or crap for my apartment. In summary I spend my money for crap.

I am always thinking "Ah that's just xx €. I can effort that." which sums up and results in that I left with 0 € in the middle of the month. And from month to month this bothers me and I always say "Next month I'll do it better than that I swear" but without effect. I keep my housekeeping book always updated but without any positive effect on that. Besides the fact that I see that I am an idiot because I spent so much money for cigarettes and energy drinks and other stupid stuff.

I am not good In renounce (do you know what I mean?). Something like "You are working every day so why should I renounce ? Buy it if you want to". Sometimes I leave the house only to buy something.. to go to the grocery store and spend some money. I don't know why I do that. I think it pops up some positive feelings when doing that. But in long term it ends up in a bad mood when I check my bank account in the middle of the month and realize that I have to overdraw my bank account (again).

So far it was always a never ending chain from dept --> dept free --> dept --> dept free. You get it? After I am out of dept I get inside again because I am not able to get along with my money. I'm some kind of feeling bad if I renounce something because Hey I am working in the IT, I am someone so I have to show that I don't have to renounce because I got it.

Further I would like to build an amount of money where I can say "Hey I have enough money saved so if something happens I can absorb that". For example the car breaks or something else.

That should be enough at first and I am also out of words to describe my situation. I hope that you can follow me.

In summary my questions are:
- Basically: How can I get along with my income?
- How can I learn to get along with my income?
- What do I have to change or how?
- Why I am I doing what I doing?
- Can I start from scratch with my finances?
-- Reset to 0 if you know what I mean

Looking forward to get some inspiring and helpful posts from you guys.
See you later and kind regards.

PS:
I am really upset when I sum up all the money which I have spent for retirement. If I think about how much money I could now have as "savings". Wow.. that would be great. But okay that's just dreaming. Let the past be the past and do it better now and in the future... (thats what I want to achive from month to month)

[getagrip]

There is a guy, Larry Winget, who wrote a book called "You're Broke Because You Want to Be: How to Stop Getting By and Start Getting Ahead" you may want to consider reading. It has many more specific tips than I can present in here.

I could also give you some advice, like:
- only carry x dollars in cash a day, and when it's out you don't spend any more for the day
- automate more and move money you want saved to a separate account that you'd have to take that extra step to access giving you one more opportunity to say no and stop yourself from taking money out of it
- take every 5 euro note you get, don't spend it, and stash them every night in the house and once a month put all the ones you collected into a separate savings account.
- Don't deny yourself completely, but limit yourself. Say one monster drink a day or one new shirt a month.
- Don't make it about the money, make it about whether you need it or not and make that your first thought. Do you need to buy another pack of cigarettes or is your health more important? Do you actually need to buy this book or can you get it at the library?
- If you want to buy something, put it back down and walk around the store some more and look at other things. Then before you go back to it, ask yourself if you really need it or if you've already hit your limit for the month and can come back in a week or two and then buy it. Chances are you won't come back and buy.

But these kinds of tricks only work if you have real goals and real desires to save money. Saving is a habit, and you have to feed that habit and make it important. So the question really is, what do you want to save for? Do you have long term goals that are really important to you? How about things or experiences you want to save up for with your child? How about peace of mind in not working again, ever, if you don't want to?

Because from what you describe, I don't believe you see a point to really saving. Let's look at the other side. How is spending hurting you? It apparently isn't since you are able to pay the bills, are not starving, and are otherwise meeting your obligations. So because there is no real and immediate downside to not saving, saving is just stopping you from doing things you enjoy, so you fight it emotionally like a kid being rebellious. Then the adult in you, the logical side, gets mad and "promises" to do better. The short term emotional "wins" are proving something to you since you put them above the long term saving goal you claim to want. I could make up some psychobabble crud here, maybe you were denied buying things as a kid or your parents took your birthday money and "saved" it and you never saw it again, whatever. The real point is you are an adult now and can recognize that there is a difference between a "want" and a "need" and you can recognize that you aren't denying yourself something but rather are choosing to help your future self by not spending money on your current self. You have no excuse other than the ones you want to make up for yourself. If saving is important, then you will make it so.

I wish you the best.

[LiquidMercury]

Renounce should be regret (just helping with the English).

An effective budgeting way I've found is to pay my bills/savings/debt repayment first and then allocate X to "everything else". I can spend up to X on whatever I feel like but I never get to spend over.

[tomfin]

You're saving 190€ a month (10% of your income), you may be able to double that by switching to e-cigarette, we did that with my husband and are saving 200€ a month just by doing this. Smoking real cigarettes is very expensive in Finland and quitting completely after 30 years is just too difficult at the moment.

We are now saving what we used to smoke (200€) a month and our total saving target is 20% of our total income, around 650€ a month. We have been doing this now for 2 months. We started from zero September 5th 2016. Automatically investing this money mostly on index funds.