Intro Hello everyone! I am a 19 year-old college student from Romania. I live with my girlfriend of a few years, 50% alone, 50% with my parents. My college offers free tuition, but I don't feel engaged or interested, as what's mostly taught is antiquated "Computer Science", frankly mostly PC anatomy rather than new and usable tech.
Financial situation Romania is what I'd call a
second world country. $1 is 4 lei. The price of everything is somewhat lower than in the US, but the salaries are a
fraction and groceries are proportionally rather expensive. For example, my middle-class parents earn a
combined ~$500 a month, groceries for a week are around $50, a can of coke is around $1, a pack of cigarettes is $4 and a gallon of gas is around $6. Not sure how useful this is, but finances are...bad... and early retirement is impossible here. My plan is to leave as soon as I get it together.
I live a largely non-financial/financially stagnating life. We live for free with my parents' grocery money, I have a meager ($60 a month for some months) scholarship for my grades as well as $200 stashed, and my girlfriend has about $1.1k stashed of her own from scholarships. I don't regularly earn money for personal spending, nor do I regularly spend it (10 days into September, and I haven't spent more than $2 while being rather socially active with "guerilla hang-outs" and picnics). I don't really buy clothes or have ongoing memberships, and I don't feel the need to spend much to be happy.
My parents, strained as they are, have some very poor financial habits, like impulse buying, mis-focusing, buying stuff because "they deserve it for their work"(even though I see money as a crystalised form of time and work, rather than a reward for it) and being rather disdainful of Mustachianism. They throw away a lot of food and have a very short cooking attention span ("oh, screw those leftovers, we're making something NEW").
My progress so far I took this summer to work on my life-skills and health, as money has been stagnating or a source of anxiety. I've implemented a three-part system for managing my money, as such:
- The Stash - my pile of earned and saved up money
- The Buffer - a strict $50 for spending on personal items and socialising. Money comes here first, refilling the "shields". If I go under 0(I never have), I start spending painfully from the Stash. If I go over $50, it flows straight into the Stash. It has helped my anxiety since my little money has been on an objective, observable slow rise.
- Groceries - money designated for buying food, home improvements, etc. My partner and I own this together, which has been an interesting delve into common funding and "fairness" with scarce money.
I've managed to individually track all of the ways in which my life would be satisfying or not, anywhere from spending habits to reading, cooking, exercise, skills, etc. I've been biking anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours daily for a few weeks now, as well as cooking regularly and spending almost nothing non-groceries. I've become far more optimistic with life, signed up for career orientation classes, made a battle plan for the sometimes nerve-wracking and asocial college life (college here isn't an All-American Experience, it's somewhere you go and come back from every day and that's all)...I'm beginning my second year, also my second-to-last, and allegedly the most difficult. My mental stability and health have been improving steadily, and I am healthily underweight. I have very good friends, but my college social network is lacking, where I am perceived as anywhere from indifferent to idealistic to extreme and cynical, as I'm not at my best in there. I don't find too many of my groupmates interesting or reliable.
Problems- "Workisbad" - My parents have inoculated into me the idea that college is the best time of your life, your 20s are the only enjoyable decade of it, and everything after it will be a slave-like trudge of earning as much as you spend in a job you despise until you die. I'm smarter than believing that, but only as of recently. At my most depressive, I start fearing adulthood, as if the conditioning is unerasable.
- My obsession with streaks - I can get pessimistic when a streak of X days in which something went rather well (I don't get depression or anxiety, I exercise, I read, I learn, etc.) gets broken, often because of my own flaws and self-destructive impulses when mental illness takes over my mind.
- Capitalism has "saved" us - Romania was under a painful communist dictatorship decades ago, and the advent of capitalism as its "saviour" has convinced a huge portion of the country that you can buying and happiness are the same, only because they had way less of each before. I struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with society, often falling off of a crisp, honest critical stance into engulfing, damaging cynicism and...
- My messianic tendencies - I tend to burn myself out and drop on all levels when acting on an impulse to fix the people around me, by trying to force them to see things they don't want to see, or spending too much time and energy telling them about what I've learned, linking them, giving them reading material. It's a childish impulse, and yet somehow I end up treating others like I'm their parent. It's the biggest drain on my life, but it has been getting better. This might be because I don't have enough actionable projects to work on.
- Financial stagnation - I "get" most financial tendencies and mentalities that I come across in my research on FI/frugality/minimalism but there's the frank fact that there isn't much I can do about it now.
- Stunted minimalism - Anywhere I go, I am forced to withstand clutter and excess. Everyone other than my partner is a hoarder, and I face friction and potential bridge-burning when suggesting decluttering. The benefits of minimalism don't get through and I get perceived as the "bad guy" for scything into their happiness, in spite of their stress management being virtually null.
Goals- I want to get a grip and find some career paths to explore or experience in any way I could.
- I want a plan after college. I'm likely to stay in my somewhat large and burgeoning city for as long as I need to, for free, while exploring life at my own pace. I have no clue what I should do, with only a vague idea that I'd work in tech.
- I want to learn new skills, preferrably for free and certifiably. I know how to program at a beginner level in several languages, and I am rather experienced with Linux. I would like concrete plans when it comes to defining my relationship to programming, as I've been less than perseverent with it once it got complicated. I can see myself being a trainer or coach perhaps more than a programmer. Web design might be appealing to me, but I'm utterly clueless as to where to go after I learn the basics.
- I want to not just read about, but implement financial changes in my life, but I have no finances to work with and experiment. I don't see myself earning money any time soon, and although I may live decently here, I'll be earning too little money to invest it meaningfully for more high-powered economies abroad. $1000 may be a moderate sum over there, but in here it can be four months' pay. Even if I earn some money here, will it be meaningful once I start moving through the world? It feels a bit futile to know that one month of entry-level work here would quadruple all of my slow, painful savings so far, and one month abroad would make several decades of my life here amount to pocket change. Is money here anything but training grounds for the rest of the world?
- I want to forward social movements such as clothing-swaps, no-spending gatherings, perhaps informal trainings and speaking. My Romanian is actually weaker than my English, however, and I'm afraid of the typical "it'll be just three dudes in the grass" that can happen with flopped events. People my age are viciously consumeristic a lot of the time, especially considering how many are born into money and don't see it as a concretion of "life spent", as I do.
- I want advice with a useful (I consider it a worthwhile investment, as I input my plentiful time into it for a rather wide variety of fields I could branch into and maybe, just maybe... connections to make) but unpleasant and short-term unuseful upcoming year of college. I have an attitude issue, to an almost childish extent, where I just hate a subject so much that I become too outraged to absorb it, which wastes a lot of my stability and time. If I could improve my attitude, the whole "absorb info, expel it at an exam, move on" process could cost less. I need positive things to focus on and engage me to make time feel worthwhile and to keep my severe depressive tendencies at bay.
- I want a healthier attitude towards an objectively broken set of rules and mentalities around me. I want what I have, I'm very happy and empowered with what I have in virtually every area of my life, but people around me are often self-destructive and misguided, poor and rich alike. I can't save them, nor can I spend all of my life being angry about them. However, I fear looking unempathetic and indifferent when not striving to fix everyone around me.
- I want any kind of advice I can get, regarding anything I may be doing right or wrong. I've read most of MMM's blog, and it has fundamentally altered my perception of life, but a woefully large portion of it simply doesn't apply to me yet, as I have little functional power over my surroundings or net worth right now. I want to know what kind of "non-job, non-money" lifestyle improvements I can make ahead of time so that I can step into broader adulthood with less to figure out "in the thick of it". As I've said, I got rather good at cooking, especially cheap, healthy, plentiful food, with oats being my eternal fallback... I'm dabbling into home projects and getting used to bike trips, I'm doing home maintenance more efficiently and enjoyably, I'm disconnecting my happiness from instant gratification... But I don't feel like I'm doing enough to be ready once money starts flowing in and out. I'm striving to work on putting things into their place, as I don't want to end up like many couples can end up: having to handle all of life all of a sudden.
Hopefully the moderate formatting will make up for the wall of text. I thank you for your time, and I'm as glad to be here as I am open to any feedback or advice :)