Spoiler alert: We made it home.
I’m pretty aggressive about saving money, but I made the choice a while back to prioritize maxing out Roth IRA contributions rather than build an emergency fund. (I have a whole argument for why I did that.) Which means that car repair bill hurt. A lot.
We’re responding to that in two ways:
- All stop on spending money we don’t have to. No eating out, no stopping by gas stations for pop. It’s funny, because I generally have absolutely zero discipline. But now, inspired by a specific hardship, I have a new zealousness of frugality. I’m enjoying it.
- Making more money. I’ve started doing freelance transcription (audio to text) and video captioning online. The pay is not great-it’s flat, so if you put in the time to Google names and places to try to get the spelling correct, which of course I do, you start to flirt with the minimum wage line-but there’s something addicting about doing work that directly converts to pay. So far: $70. Goal: $1800. I want to erase that car repair.
I’m also wondering if I can sustain this excitement about it… if so, it might be interesting to pretend my salary doesn’t exist when it comes to discretionary spending, and make myself earn whatever I want to spend.
Downside: It’s after 4:00 AM.