A Word From A Personal Finance Writer Struggling With Finances

When I made the decision to become a freelance writer a year ago, I was in a very different place financially. I had a maxed out emergency fund, the extra cushion of severance from my last job, and I was hitting all of my investing and savings goals with ease. 

Today, my finances look quite different. As a personal finance writer, this hasn’t been an easy reality to confront.

In the last year, I have had to rely on my emergency fund to cover my basic needs, and contributing to my savings and investing goals has been temporarily put on hold.

Luckily, I have the privilege of living with a partner who supports me in taking this chance on myself and believes in my dream of surpassing my previous salary through my writing. However, the experience of reaching my savings goals only to see those resources depleted has taught me a lot about my relationship with money and how easy it is to snap in and out of good money habits.

Managing Money Is Fun (When You Are Making Money)

One lesson I learned quickly, which in retrospect should have been more obvious, is that being good at managing your finances is a lot easier, and a lot more fun, when you are making a lot of money. 

Conventional wisdom states that you should follow a stricter budget when you are earning less money, and sure, this makes sense. But from my experience, following a strict budget is so much easier, and fun, when all that money you are not spending is going towards increasing your savings. 

I know that the usual concern in this situation is lifestyle creep, a concept where you slowly raise your lifestyle and spending habits as your income increases. However, this wasn’t exactly my experience.

The height of my financial discipline came at the height of my earning, and as my earnings have slowly dwindled, so has my financial discipline. 

When you are saving money in survival mode, it is a lot easier to slip back into old habits and mentally check out to avoid the stress. 

The Power Of Avoidance

I’m not a total stranger to lifestyle creep, however. The first half of my twenties I felt mentally “checked out” and detached from my finances. It was a learned behavior from my upbringing, and one that I always assumed I would grow out of as I got older and started my career. Spoiler: That’s not how it works.

I remember calling my dad during college, financially frustrated and exhausted, venting to him about how I was unable to make my paycheck last past the weekend. His response was “Brittany, you make $140 a paycheck, you don’t earn enough to save anything.”

True, it certainly would have been difficult to save on my $300/month salary as a college student, but as I got older my paychecks increased, my mentality remained stuck in this conversation.

With every raise, I justified my spending by telling myself I was barely earning anything, so how was I expected to save any of it? Having never set a goal on when I would begin saving, for years I used that conversation with my dad as permission to keep spending.

Spending Money Is Addicting, But Saving It Can Be Too

My aha moment of money awareness came in my mid-twenties after experiencing an overwhelming amount of embarrassment for my overall lack of self-control and discipline in this area of my life.

I knew that unlearning 25 years of bad habits would be a lengthy process, but I found it quite simple to adjust my mindset once I finally confronted my finances head-on. Expenses like ordering delivery or Ubering, something I had been doing multiple times a week, now felt like setting my money on fire. Getting my nails done suddenly seemed completely self-indulgent.

I know I am not alone in this phenomenon. Time and time again, I have witnessed with the people I offer financial counseling to, this ability to develop an addiction-like obsession with monitoring finances and shifting the shopping endorphin high to the satisfaction of seeing a growing savings account instead.

The harsh reality of this, though, is how easily it is to snap back out of it again once your progress starts to go stale. This is where I find myself today. 

Where Do I Go From Here?

Today, my journey with my finances looks like trying to find ways to stay passionate about money while I confront the reality of being a freelancer with a fluctuating income. Much like saving, writing about finances was much simpler, and more fun, with the comfort of a well stocked bank account. 

Looking at these two extreme scenarios, one in which you are completely avoiding saving, and another which you are completely avoiding spending, it seems like the obvious solution would be to find a balance between the two. But what does this balance look like? 

Well, for me, it looks like continuing to write and think critically about the state of my finances and how it impacts those I am helping with theirs. It looks like finding new ways to stay busy without spending excessively and working hard to fulfill my creative and financial goals, even if most days that dream feels far off.

I write on Substack, I read as often as I can (are you subscribed to my book newsletter?) and I go on occasional hikes. I also work incredibly hard to make a living out of everything I just mentioned. Thankfully, all of these tasks take up enough of my time that I manage not to fall into a financial black hole, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t always lurking around the corner.