Before I left my parents’ house, I made it a goal of mine to learn how to be smart with my money—after all, I was preparing myself to move to the most expensive city in the world, well aware of the fact that I was not making nearly enough to live comfortably, even with a year’s worth of extra savings (reports say you need $100,000 just to get by here, btw). 

And so I opened Google Spreadsheets and plugged in the numbers. I’m not going to pretend I did this well, or used any fancy equations or anything like that, but I did my best to lay out everything—from the money going in (not a lot) to the money going out (a lot). After all of my calculations, I knew exactly how much I had left to spend in a given month. And my credit card was always there as a buffer in case of an emergency, so it’s fine, all set and ready to go. 

It’s funny, I got so confident in myself and my abilities and my non-equation equations that I was able to put away a chunk of money into my savings at the end of last month. That was, until this month, when I looked at the credit card bill.

In case of an emergency my ass! I completely neglected to define for myself what I meant by “an emergency!” Awkward co-worker get together? Time to buy another drink. 95 degree day? I’m going to have to have some ice cream, it would be against summertime protocol if I didn’t. Oh! I know, I’ll cut down on electric costs by not using my AC and instead I’ll just…buy an overpriced coffee and sit in this coffee shop for hours instead. 

And then when there’s actually an emergency, like, I don’t know, waking up after dozing off to your neighbor pounding on your door at 11 p.m. to tell you that she thinks there’s a pungent smell of gas coming from your apartment, and, upon further inspection, realizing it is indeed coming from your apartment and it’s your gas stove, and it’s leaking gas, and then subsequently coordinating with your landlord a time for the replacement stove to be delivered, and when that one is actually delivered, it’s broken as well, leading you to incessantly text your landlord about a new delivery until he apologizes profusely, and promises a rent deduction for the amount of money you’ve spent in takeout, and then when a new stove is delivered a week later, and you follow up about that rent reduction you were promised, your landlord seemingly has thrown his phone into the ocean and disappeared from the face of the earth?

Yeah, that wasn’t exactly outlined in my budget chart. I guess that’s what they call a rainy day fund…

You really think I would know better after reading (and re-reading) Confessions of a Shopaholic, but alas…

Moral of the story? The older I get, the more I realize that spending some amount of money on a given day is pretty much unavoidable—no matter how much you may try to resist. And I’m not writing all of this to discourage you from planning your spending, because I do think, to a degree, it has helped me tell myself that I made a spreadsheet for this and that I know better and it’s all there for me laid out nice and pretty! And tracking where money gets spent the most, and how you can cut down on costs, are incredibly valuable skills to have throughout your lifetime, especially with these Social Security projections…

At the same time, what I’m saying is that you cannot be too hard on yourself when those plans maybe don’t always work out from one month to the next. It’s impossible for you to plan for electric costs during the worst heat wave in history, or for appliance malfunctions, or for just generally when you’re having a hard day and you need that ice cream cone to cheer you up. 

After all, money comes back, but those memories of the smell of sweet sweet gas filling your apartment last you a lifetime. ❤