TL;DR: I'm cheap - how do you get around the mental block of spending more?
I've been notoriously cheap over the last few years. It was an important stage in my life. I was getting out of debt while in a house I had overbought. I was also unemployed for a period of time. During this period of my life I would spend very little. I did all of my own vehicle repairs, watched finances like a hawk, spent as little as possible, rarely did anything during my time off. It was an incredibly important period in my life - but things are changing.
I'm now finding that I'm cheap.
Fucking cheap. I still want to do my own vehicle repairs -- although I hate repairing them. Even this week, my fridge broke. I would rather spend the time with my head in my fridge than paying someone $150-$200 to come fix it for me. I've probably spent about 6 hours working on the repair. I hate doing this shit. Last week I spent a couple days working on the printer trying to get it to work better - I failed on that one.
Today I have a computer that's not working great, need a new printer, a cracked phone, three old cars in the driveway that don't run well enough to drive, a bicycle in the garage torn apart, and a TV with several pixels not working and long past its normal life. Stuff around the house that needs repaired also (lots siding, eaves, fencing, concrete, and more spiders and yellow jackets than I should have).
I'm financially at a point where all tax deductible accounts are maxed, I'm starting to save in taxable, EF is 10 mo, and ER is a foregone conclusion - it's just a matter of time. In fact, saving more doesn't move the needle to when I retire all that much maybe a year or two.
Yet, I live like a pauper and can't spend the money to get these repairs taken care of. It's silly - I know. Without question my time is better spent improving my own skills than doing repairs on things I don't know much about.
I've also been thinking about giving more to charity, but can't seem to pull the trigger there either.
I keep thinking about "Your Money or Your Life's" "enough"
graph. It seems that I'm on the left side of "enough" for me.
Hopefully this hasn't come across as braggy, just thought some of the situational facts were important. Has anyone else been in the same situation? How have you powered through and changed your mentality? Any tools on changing of your mentality or thought process, etc?
I've tried taking baby steps - it doesn't seem to help. In fact, I had someone replace part of the fence this summer. It took more effort to find someone I wanted to do the work than if I had just done the work myself. I will admit that they did a better job than I would have though.