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What's the biggest challenge in your own budget? For me, I would say just taking the time to actually pay attention to my budget ongoing week to week day to day is difficult because it's easy for me personally to kind of put on the back burner because I want to be irresponsible sometimes. That's fair. Maybe you don't want to take it as seriously as I know I should.
So the hardest thing for me as far as budgeting goes is just making sure that I'm being honest with myself and holding myself accountable and making sure that I truly know if I'm over or under my budget. That's pretty difficult for me. Okay. Okay.
What do you do as far as keeping track? I know that's one of the struggles I have is like week by week I'm good about writing down how much I'm going to spend. Like, all right, this week I'm going to spend I don't know $100 on gas and $100 on groceries and then I go to the store and I don't actually stay within those numbers. What do you do to kind of help make sure that you're keeping yourself accountable?
Well I think that I've had a progression personally and when you live with someone else I think it becomes a little more complicated because you're budgeting for you and another person especially if you're married or you have a life partner that you live with that your finances are kind of intertwined. So recently my budgeting situation has changed over the last year because my girlfriend and I moved in together and so we've kind of gone through a process as far as building that up. So what we started with in order to not be overwhelmed and not try to make, you know, move mountains in one day was we just started living our lives normally and trying to be conscious of not spending too much and at the end of the month we would both go through our shared expenses, write it down, date amounts and everything and just see where we stand without a budgeting mindset just to see where we are. Okay.
And then from there we had a starting point if that makes sense to say hey, you know, this is some, maybe some irresponsible spending and now we know where we can focus on maybe writing some wrongs and focus on being more efficient as we move forward. So that was a few months that we did that just to kind of see what we had as far as recurring expenses and that's where we started kind of trimming something. Some recurring expenses that we had like subscriptions or something like that we had too many. So we started cutting those and then we got to a point where we felt like, okay, we're getting closer to an amount of money that we're spending that we're comfortable with.
We really sat down and said, okay, now we really got to be strict about ourselves and stay on this budget. And that's where I said my difficulty comes in saying, okay, now I've decided this is the budget. How do I hold myself accountable? That's fair.
That's fair. Do you have joint make accounts or anything like that? We don't. Okay.
That's fair. That was one of the struggles for Jay and I when we first got together was this mentality. So we've always made similar amount of money into a more recent years and we first started like our pay was within 50 cents an hour of each other. And I had at that point in my life, I'd already had an apartment that didn't work out.
I had a room that went separate ways. So when we got an apartment together, it was his first time moving out. But I'd already done it before. So I kind of knew how to manage, not like budgeting because I wasn't an expert at it, but I knew how to manage paying the rent on time, prioritizing utilities and making sure that, you know, your paychecks will have enough to cover all of your bills.
And that was our new territory for him. So for a while, he kind of followed my lead with it. We eventually, so we've been together, we've been together eight years now. So we eventually got joint pick accounts, but that was one of the first struggles that we had when we started sitting down as a couple and talking about our finances openly and saying, Hey, look, we are intending to stay together for some amount of time.
So we need to get serious about where you are and where I am and where we want to be together. A big learning curve. I don't think we were overspending. I think we had a control thing.
Like I was so worried when he got a hold of the joint account and all of our money in the same place, he would see, Oh, look, well, there's, you know, $1,100 in the account. So I can buy whatever I want to go by. I had this fear of that $1,100. That's, you know, the car payment and rent and utilities and groceries.
That's all of this money put together. It's not spending money. And for the longest time, we didn't communicate with each other very well about that. It was just a growing pain, I guess.
But since then, the biggest thing we've been trying to do, especially lately, now that years have gone by, we've gone through a lot together financially is try to sit down and talk each other off of stuff. Like that's really healthy, actually. Yeah. You got a cliff left a little bit as far as purchase is.
Yeah. The amount of times I want to buy a new car just because I don't know I've had my car for over five years and it's paid off, but it's like I've had it for five years. So why not get something new because that's what society tells you you should do? And he's like, well, hey, you know, your car's fine.
You need to keep that a little bit longer. It's no big deal. You only drive it to and from work anyway. And then on the inverse, you know, he'll go to the store and see a movie that he wants to buy.
And I'm like, well, that's only $5, but every time you go, that's $5 each time you go and that adds up. And so we've had to grow together and prioritize ourselves together, but that's been a struggle and it's an ongoing struggle and they're quite stops because it's like, although you can be on the same page or always going to be a little apart because you're two separate people. Correct. But that's always tricky.
So I think the first conversation when you first sat down and talked about finances openly, that can be a little uncomfortable. Even if it's two people that really love each other, if it's a, you know, a couple, a married couple, anybody that first is down and talks about finances openly. Oh, it was a fight. Yeah.
Okay, exactly. And that is emotionally charged. Right. And I think that that the reason that it's uncomfortable to talk to someone about your finances, the same reason that it's uncomfortable for you to look at your own if you're not confident in the amount of money you're making or the amount of bills that you have, if you just don't want to look at it because it gives you some level of anxiety.
Yeah. I think that that is amplified when you're talking to someone else, especially if you're sharing a bank account or if you're thinking about the idea of sharing a bank account or something like that. So that's something that Katie and I haven't done yet. And I know that that's going to be a struggle, not necessarily any more than it is for anybody else, but just it is something that we will take time to sit down and talk about and kind of align our ideas about how we want to use our money.
Yeah. And that is important. Well, finances in general, so I think when you're, especially when you're dating somebody or whatever scale you are with your partner, finances are very vulnerable. It's a very taboo topic.
It's like, you know, you're supposed to always have your life together. You're never supposed to have a small savings account or be in debt or anything like that. And so when you sit down with somebody who you admire and you appreciate and you want to have their respect, it's very humbling to sit down and look at it and say, Hey, here's where I actually am. This is what my credit score currently is.
This is my whole history. Cause it shows a different side of you. So you have to kind of like really recognize what you are up against. If that makes sense.
Definitely. And I also think it's important to recognize the fact that life happens, right? So great people find themselves in financially sticky situations. And people that I love and even myself through, you know, things that I've done that weren't actually the best with my money.
I found myself situations where I'm stressed out about the amount of money my bank account or the amount of debt I have compared to the expenses that I have to pay the next month. And there's an extra benefit from somebody else too. Exactly. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person.
That just means, you know, Hey, that's something it is what it is. And in order for me to be honest with myself, I gotta be honest with someone else about it. And it's important. Maybe you're listening to this episode because you're concerned for someone you love.
Maybe you're listening because you are trying to find some good tips to give to your partner or your family member that you feel like is getting going down the wrong path as far as their finances go, getting into too much debt or just not paying attention to their spending. It's important to be understanding and not talk down to anyone about this type of thing because it is uncomfortable and it's important to recognize that it's uncomfortable to talk about. And it can be an issue that is really polarizing in a relationship. So I think that it's important how people come together and discuss these types of things.
And it's important to be understanding and come at the situation from a standpoint of how do we improve the situation? How do we have healthy lives together as far as a financial concern? And where do we go from here? And I'm not, oh my gosh, you've got into this situation and this is how you got there and it's all bad.
It's important to reflect and understand how you got there so you can make improvements. But that is how you want to, or how it would suggest you approach that conversation. I agree. Budgeting in general is not just budgeting.
It's money altogether. It's one of those areas where some people thrive off shame. Like they thrive off of being called out and saying, you know, you don't have everything together like you think you do. I'm not one of those people.
I'm very prideful. I'm almost arrogant to a degree. So I don't want to show my negative qualities. I want people to see only the best of me.
When you're talking about a budget, there's always just naturally this connotation that because you're on a budget, something in your life is wrong. You've messed up. You are irresponsible. And that was one of those things that I know I had to sit down and accept within myself.
My budget does not tell me that I have made mistakes. My budget tells me where I want to be, what goals I want to achieve next. It helps me spell out an exact path to get there versus just winging it and hoping one day I'll make it happen. Or even worse, what I did for a long time was I tell myself I'd want something.
I would try to save up for it. I would never actually be successful at saving. And then eventually enough time had gone by where I said, you know what, well, now I'm 25 years old and I'm supposed to have this. So then I would just open up a credit card and go get it or do something like that.
Because I don't know. I struggle with that myself for a while of you have to have certain things by a certain age because that's what you're supposed to do. But that's one of those things, just being transparent, recognizing like spelling out what you need financially is a very mature thing to do. It is something that if you want to success, if you want, like let's be frank about it.
Bill Gates, billionaire. I'd love to be a billionaire. Even Oprah. I just want to be doing her bank account.
That's my last aspiration. That'd be amazing. I bet you she has a budget. Actually, you know, when you make that much money, you have an accountant that manages the budget for you.
But more of the story, she has a budget. She has somebody who looks down and says, all right, this is how much money you have coming in. This is how much money you have going out. Bare minimum, the foundation is that that has to balance.
She has to be bringing in at least as much if not more than she spends. That's all a budget essentially is making sure that you're in that same harmony so that you can reach the goals you want. You can know without a doubt, without any reservation that you can keep roof over your head. You can keep food in your fridge.
You can keep gas in your car. You can keep your life sustained. You can keep your money out of plan to save for the holidays, to save for vacations and various other things in life. You have to start somewhere.
Exactly. I think that you make really good points there because maybe when you start budgeting, it really is just to get an idea of what your expenses are. You just have no idea how much you're spending every month. So going through a budget is your exercise to figure that out, right?
That's great. That's a great way to start. What I like even more is how you talk about making your budgeting about outcomes that you're trying to reach goals that you have instead of just winging it. Like you said, it's really great because maybe you can think about budgeting in a more positive light if it's about something that you're working towards and a big goal that you add for your family or your career or whatever it is.
You can think about that in terms of this is such a positive thing I'm going to do and this is how I got to get there. Exactly. Hold yourself to that. It's not necessarily about, oh my gosh, I'm so bad about spending money.
I need a budget. It's not about that. It can be positive too. I think that's really great.
Any financial planning that you ever do and financial planning, I mean that in a very broad sense, just any planning that you do with your finances for your family or planning life out in general. It's really important to be outcome oriented and goals-based. It makes it easier to know exactly what you need to be saving and what you're going to where your expenses need to be so you can save the proper amount of money to get there. So having a specific and tangible goal is important also because if you're not making enough money to get a specific goal, then that's going to affect your expenses and your timelines.
It's just all placed together and it's important to think about what outcomes you really wanted to get achieve so you can come back to your budget, be specific and feel confident about what you're doing. I think that's, so professionally I work in a competitive field. It's all about numbers and reaching your goals, setting higher than you think you can achieve and aiming for that. I've learned professionally and I applied to my personal finances.
I need to be specific. I want to save money in a vague sense. I have to say that I want to save $1000. I have to spell it out like that.
Or even sometimes everyone will push myself. I'll say no, I want to save $1000 in the next 90 days and this is what I need to do. This is how much I need to cut back or how much more I need to bring in to make that number work. So for me, spelling it out does wonders because then it's not just an abstract idea.
It is something that I've set on a calendar and circumstance and by the state I must be at this point. So that's- Sure. So when you're budgeting, do you include the amount that you're saving every week or every day? I do.
So whether it's on a computer program or writing on a piece of paper, you actually do include that saving amount in your budget. So you can be called yourself to that as well. So how my budget started is after we had our whole breakdown about the joint account thing and we realized, all right, we're going to start planning together as a couple and building our life together as a couple. We sat down and wrote out every single expense we could possibly think of.
We went with the obvious stuff like the rent. You know you have to pay for the roof over your head and you know you have to pay for the car outside if it's financed. Then we broke out our bank account and went through our online banking and found every little other small thing that we could think of like the subscription services we weren't counting, the time we were going to go out to eat, things like that, wrote all of it down, looked at all of it, added it up and said, all right, so based off this, this is roughly where we think our expenses are. And then we lined our income to it to figure out how balanced we were.
And one thing that I learned very quickly, very quickly, very hard was to be forgiving, recognize you're going to make mistakes. Math is rigid. Math is very black and white, but life is not. You don't know what the next three days are going to have a like a head of you.
You don't know if you're going to get sick or if you know you're going to tell me what it's going to come in. Like as I speak, my air conditioning, I guess my heater, my heater's not working properly in my house. So right now I'm fine. Am I budget saying I'll have this much for utilities, but in the next 30 days I'm going to have utility bill that's higher than I normally plan for.
So being forgiving and molding around as you need to, making adjustments as you need to, I think it's extremely important as long as you're aiming for the goal at the end, whatever that goal might be for you. How did you and Katie sit down and kind of figure out where you all want to be? Well, it was difficult. I think that we're still kind of going through that process.
So it's hard to say how we progressed so far to the end product because I'm not there yet. Right now what we're trying to do is classify our spending so that we are looking at individual transactions going back and looking at online banking and really diving into the details there. The hardest thing for us is to classify our transactions into whether it's entertainment or through restaurant dining, utilities, whatever. What we're really struggling with right now is just continuing to define those categories and then making sure that we are continually going through and saying, okay, what was our spending in the entertainment category this month and where do we go over and sometimes you're going to go over and in entertainment, but you're going to be under and something else.
I think that's important for us to understand as a couple is that, yeah, we might go over on entertainment one month, but we might also spend less on guests. Right. That makes sense. So it's not about spending the same exact amount of money on everything every month, every day.
It's just about give and take how life is in general. You're going to go over on something, you're going to go under on some things, but just making sure you know and you are not putting it on the back burner and forgetting about it is the most important thing and just being supportive of the other person. It's kind of where we are right now, but we're definitely still in the process of kind of I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. I'll say perfect our budget, but we're not there yet.
And it's a struggle that we'll continue to have, but that's normal. And I think that it's important to just continue to work through it. So that's where we are. How do you feel about, I'm not going to name any app names because they don't pay to be part of the show, but how do you feel about those various apps that exist that will help manage your expenses and kind of tell if you're over under your budget for that month?
How do you feel about those? I actually like them. And I'll tell you why. The reason that I do like them is that it does give you a way, if you don't want to sit down and put a paper and write things out and it gives you a way to do things a little quicker.
A lot of the apps that I see people using though, you do have to go in and classify things yourself or set a rule. The nice thing about those apps is that you can go in and if you have a current purchase, you set it up and you can set a rule for that purchase. So if you say any purchase from this store within this amount, it's not a transaction. And that can make it much more manageable to keep up with your budget.
I think that's very valuable to some people and to me too, because it's hard to every month or every time you sit down to think about and go through every single transaction and classify it. It might be much easier if you had a program doing it for you. So I would say I encourage people to use those. It's just important to continue using them and not.
I keep coming back to that. It's just important to continue utilizing it. So it's like my doctor told me, you know, if you're going to want to diet, the best diet is the diet you'll follow. Right?
Yeah. So that's it. So that's the thing of budgeting. You know, it doesn't have to be a cookie cutter.
This is the best thing for you because I'm telling you, no, you got to really do some inward thinking and come up with what's actually going to work. And that's going to be different for everybody. So I think that, you know, it's important for me to kind of think about, I don't want to preach it or anyone. I just want to have this conversation about conceptually, how does this budget work and how can you start to work through building a budget?
It's not going to happen overnight. And that'll be some giving go and just never give up on it. I think that's the biggest thing. Just push a beer and keep working on it.
That's fair. Yeah. One thing I didn't mention when I sat down with my budget, we looked over everything, but it started as a goal and I realized how mandatory it really needs to be is saving money. I, so I, it took me some years to get this correct, but I figured out the trick for me and my personal finances is to be smarter than myself.
Like that's really the whole game is to think about what does Adrian do, that Adrian wishes he would stop doing and how can I stop him from doing it and saving money is one of those topics where I wanted to save the money. And I would even be good about setting up like an automatic transfer, you know, my paycheck gets deposited to my account and then automatically the same day, so much get moved to a savings account. I was like, look at me, I'm saving money. Yeah, this is great.
But then I would go to, I don't know, Best Buy or something and I'd be walking around killing time because we live in a world where you can't do things for free anymore and you get that guilt where you don't want to leave the store and be handed because then it feels like it's something wrong. But anyway, walk around the store and I'd see something I want to buy and then I would think about the cost and how it's expensive, but you know, I really want it and I'd justify why I should buy it and then I would transfer the savings back into my checking and swipe my debit card and walk out the door with this new shiny item. So one of the tricks I had to do and it took me a few years to figure it out was to set up that same system where I said I want to save, I don't know, let's say $50 a paycheck, I set up direct deposit for $50 every single paycheck to a different institution somewhere that I don't have a checking account, I don't have a debit card, an ATM card, checks nothing. So if I want to withdraw that money and use it, I have to physically drive down there, stand in line, do the walk of shame, ask for this money and then go spend it.
And a lot of times that caused me to reevaluate why I was getting the money to begin with. I stopped a lot of man-puls purchases because it's like, well, guess what, Adrian, you don't have the money, it's somewhere else. But more important for me is it was out of sight, out of mind. I don't micromanage my finances, I have much other, many other things I like to do with my time.
So weeks and months would go by where I was just not even looking at that account and then I look whenever something happens, like I get a flat tire and it's like, holy crap, I have you know, $800 in here, I didn't even know about that. And that was the first time that happened when I really said this has to be priority for me was when Jay went to, so we've been together for eight years, we started dating when he was 19 years old and I was 20 at the time. Around that time a very important financial thing occurs in your life that you're not really prepared for but it just kind of happens. And that's when you fall off your parents insurance program.
So one day your health insurance is gone and we found that out for him when he went to the doctor because he got sick and we got a bill from the doctor for $200 and his prescriptions were going to be another $300 and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this can't be, this can't be. Called around and figured out, okay, that's because he aged out of this, like out of the policy he's not on anymore. And I remember distinctly sitting in our apartment, Jay had said to me, well, I talked to the doctor's office and they have a payment plan we can do, you know, we can pay this much a month and just get that balance squared away. And while he was talking, I was looking on my cell phone, I opened up our online banking, I went to that particular institution where our savings had been and I was like, oh, no, we have the money, I'll just go withdraw it and write them a check and call it a day.
And when I recognized that if I hadn't, if we hadn't set that up, then him getting that bill would have been another debt in our life would have been another expense month by month and it may have been something that would financially break us because for us it was a couple hundred bucks but what if it was a couple thousand dollars? We wouldn't have had the money, that wouldn't have changed the fact that we needed to pay this bill. Having that emergency fund that kind of got built up over time let me opt out of that situation. And peace of mind is the most important thing, because I mean, in life things will happen.
Things are going to happen whether or not you feel for it, whether or not you want it to occur, if you plan for it, you will get in a car accident, you will get a high utility bill, you will come home and have to replace an appliance or, you know, your dog should up the couch or something but you can either make it debt by getting a credit card out and paying for it, you can create another expense or you can say, you know what, I've saved this money, it really sucks to spend it but it's there to deal with this, here's the time, let me go get it and pay for it. Right, I really like that your idea of emergency fund and especially kind of outsmarting yourself by keeping it in a place that's a little less accessible in order to get to, that's really smart. And I think that, you know, you listeners know if that's something that will work for you, maybe you're not sure, it might be worth it to give it a try. If you're ever interested in looking for online savings accounts for something like an emergency fund, I would recommend going to a website called BankRade.com and it's a good resource for a lot of great things but specifically you can look at online savings accounts and see the best rates in town, or not in town nationally actually.
So you can look and see what accounts are out there available to you and see if there are any, you know, account minimums or anything like that but I really like Adrian's idea of just picking an account that's not going to be as accessible so you don't rationalize taking that money and using it on something that you don't necessarily need. And the emergency fund is important but I also really like that you set it up to have automatic contributions to your emergency fund or your savings account. It doesn't have to be a lot, you don't have to establish a quote unquote emergency fund today or you're going to fail at finances, that's not how it is at all. The emergency fund is just something maybe you want to start saving up for right now and that could be as little as $10 a month or $20 a month, really just whatever you can fit based on the amount of money that you're bringing in in your expenses are expenses very, very widely based on medical bills or anything like that.
But I can tell you that my personal experience, that a credit card being an emergency fund definitely causes some anxiety down the road that you don't want to deal with because maybe it's peace of mind in the moment where okay I have a credit card that I can use to pay for this emergency whether it be a broken down car or a flat tire or bad appliance, you know, to build like a drink in a J situation. But all you know, I'll play the script on the credit card thing too. I've been there, I was in a lot of credit card debt that I worked for a long time to pay it off but I, building a career in lending, one thing that I've seen personally happen time after time that you know you don't recognize is a possibility unless you know is that the lender doesn't have to leave that card available for you. Like a lot of times I've seen where somebody reaches hot water and I've personally been there myself where all of a sudden I came home one day and I was unemployed, my job had let me go and that was it, my income dropped, bills still had to be paid, you know, you're rent, your landlord doesn't care that you don't have a job, they still want to rent on the first of the month.
Land mortgage payment? Yeah, that's the way the world revolves but you turn like you're in this situation and like basically from the lending standpoint if they kind of pick up on the fact that things are getting rough for you that maybe your income is no longer there or that you're starting to miss payments on other stuff like if you have a car loan with them and you you know start falling behind on your car loan they're going to cut that credit card off because they recognize hey you can't pay your bills anymore we're not going to give you access to more money when you can't pay the money you already owe and so if you're relying on a credit card to get you through a tough situation that could be taken from under you and you don't even realize that it was time to go use it or I've had this happen for myself also where I had a credit card for a few years I'd use it for a while I paid it off, laugh went on, forgot about it, cut the card up and went on with my life, they closed it for an activity because I hadn't been using it for so long but in my head I was planning and waiting or not waiting but planning for the day whenever I was going to be in hot water and I was going to lean on that credit card because that was my emergency fund it wasn't there anymore and I wouldn't have known until I went looking for it and then what's your game plan then? Yeah well especially you know you don't necessarily want to just automatically apply for another one either especially if you've opened up other lines of credit recently you got to be careful about that. Or if you don't have a job they're not going to approve you because you don't have any income.
Exactly then you're really out of luck. One thing that kind of goes along with the discussion about the credit cards is the difference between enjoying money and enjoying debt. I think that's a really cool concept to think about enjoying debt or having a nice lifestyle that is supported by debt maybe the credit cards or personal loans or lines of credit or maybe you're just constantly opening up a HELOC or something like that is that it's more expensive to live that way because of the interest so let's talk about that for a moment. How does that throw a wrench into your budgeting?
Interest payments can really hurt you because now you're not only are paying for your expenses you're paying someone else because they paid for your expenses for you if that makes sense. Yeah you're paying somebody for the privilege of allowing you to borrow money from them. Exactly and so if we can kind of hold ourselves accountable and do this budgeting exercise and get to the point where you know through some trial and tribulation you get a few years into it and you get to the point where you say man I really have some money saved up I've been saving for our retirement and I've really gotten good at this budgeting thing. It's like you're going to start realizing that money tends to stick around a little better because you're not paying so much on interest your expenses actually will go down just because you have a little money saved up and so I think the further you get into it and the more money you build the quicker you get and just the more confidence you build and that's really great too.
There was one point I had to get the order was. Oh yeah I remember that something else and that was a lesson I learned the hard way. I feel like that's the whole summary of me in this conversation for this episode is things I learned the hard way. Right.
One thing that I when I reflected back on my life as I've grown old and with wisdom is for a long time I followed in my parents footsteps of you know I grew up in their household. Thankfully so my parents both grew up in poverty and they and all intents and purposes ended up being the American Dream. My mother immigrated here from Malaysia and they built up from a very poor lifestyle to being pretty reasonably middle-class well off and so I was born into that situation where we never had to worry about anything. I always lived in two storey houses.
I went to decent schools. I never had two questions where my next meal was coming from. That was my background and so when I became an adult and all of a sudden I didn't have all this money around me per se. It wasn't my money because my parents didn't give me any but the things they provided the fact that they could keep the house at whatever time they wanted it to be at all year long.
The fact that there was always dinner made every single night. No question of what kind of food was going to be in the refrigerator. There was always Wi-Fi which probably already I learned that when I moved out real quick I was like okay I need this back and whenever I went back to my parents house that was the best part about going. But I got out into the adult world and honestly I feel like a lot of people especially in my generation kind of we weren't really prepared for the costs of adulthood and so it's natural to compare yourself to people around you.
I idolized my parents and so I saw where they were and it's like oh well I want to do the same things. I want to have the same things and go on the same trips and live the same kind of lifestyle they did but I neglected to realize two totally different worlds that we lived in. One of them was I was 19 and they were in their early 50s. Number two they went through all of that struggle already.
So I'm comparing myself to two grown adults teetering on the verge of being ready for retirement and I want to be exactly where they are in a quarter of the time with none of the resources and the fact that our worlds a little bit different wages are a lot lower expenses are a lot higher. That's important that right there is very important because even comparing so even if you've done a really good job and you are comparing yourself to your parents and saying well by the time my parents were this age my age they were here I'm not quite there yet. I'm making the same amount of money they were at this age and you feel bad about it maybe because I've done that where I've realized okay yeah my parents struggled and went through different things like you look back at your big pictures and see the house we lived in. It's not as nice as the one you were living in.
So there obviously was a struggle there but it's also important to think about the fact that the milestone that your parents hit when they were 30 is going to be different than the milestone that you hit or I hit when we were 30 because the economies are much different in time. Exactly what you're saying as far as inflation goes it's way outpaced wage growth and basically what that means is that everything is just more expensive that would be based on the amount of money that would make it. So it is important to think about those milestones and say my parents bought their house when they were 30 maybe that's the first time house purchase but that doesn't mean that you have to do that. That just means maybe you're working towards that but don't hold yourself I think that's the point you're trying to make is obviously don't compare yourself to other people do what makes sense and what is healthy for your finances and for your happiness and for your peace of mind.
I think communication is key to actually my mom humbled me on that not that long ago because I everything I just said was a realization recently of how I was comparing myself so I had waited my parents and my parents bought their first house at 34 I think that was my father was. I bought my first house at 22 and I know even then I am I'm not the norm on that part like my generation we don't do that somehow I managed to do it but my mom very quickly reminded me well don't forget Adrian um you did do this at that age and you know we're proud of you but like don't compare your life and your struggle to our life and our struggle because your father had two kids when he was 16 and you didn't. So it's easy to look at the finished product and say I want to be exactly where they are but you don't just like you know your struggle internally you know what you're dealing with you don't know what the next person is because I'm not showing that kind of like social media where you only see the highlight reel you see the good you don't see the bad the the fights the arguments the how we're going to pay for this the going over budget the being like too low with your income you don't see any of that you just see the finished product and if you compare yourself to that you will never be happy and it's really easy to discourage yourself to ever get on track because it feels like well I can't just get started today and be there tomorrow so I don't even want to do any of this. Right so really I kind of like where this this conversation has gone I'm really excited about all the future conversations we're gonna have and all the good information that we can pass along to our listeners that's really great I'm really excited about it.
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