Hi. I'm James,
I'm 27 and working as a software developer in Sydney Australia. The way I am (i.e. my personality etc.) puts me on the asperger side of the autism spectrum.
As I have grown up I have practiced the most important rules regarding money (i.e. almost all debt is bad), which when combined with upper-middle-class decently-frugal parents has meant that I never have had a credit card and have had a HISA for a while. University has meant I have a large HECS (student loan, inflation-rate + 0% interest, indexed/compounded yearly).
Up until a year ago I was a long-time welfare recipient. First an undergraduate degree, where I didn't really look for work until after graduation. Then a year of looking for work. Then I decided to go back to uni for increased chance at getting a job due to having more education on my CV. I then went back to job-searching.
Being on welfare I learnt ways to save money but the addition of a bit of supplemental income ($150-$200 a month) meant I treated myself to a coffee-shop coffee weekly. I had an amount in my savings account that I set as 'Paid' and regarded when I was over that as being able to buy something extra and when I was under that I was essentially borrowing from myself and so couldn't spend any as I had to pay off the 'debt'. Most of the savings I made went to maintaining a motorbike I bought with cash for $2k, so it actually meant that my savings never really got back to where it was.
The job I have had now for just over a year as a software developer is casual, but with mostly the ability to do full-time hours. It's nice because of the flexibility, but it has lead to some volatile income, exacerbated by personal issues. I also started buying take-away food more (including coffee).
I have never been hugely successful at budgeting. I did end up working out a system using a checking and savings account: Transfer all but what you estimate you can live on till next payment to the savings account and you only need to worry if you end up needing to transfer stuff back. This works well for regular costs but can hide the amount you are saving for infrequent costs (e.g. vehicle registration).
Having been employed for a few months, my self-imagined loan was paid off and I imagined that I could afford to purchase something. So I did, I bought a $2k IPad pro. However, I mis-estimated how much money I would earn in the next few months (i.e. over December and January) and the timing of my already planned additional spending (vehicle registration + a week-long conference totalling about $1k-$1.5k) and some not-so-expected spending (vehicle maintenance required for registration). So once again I was in 'debt' to myself.
As I have been saving to pay myself back, I found out about a $10k electric motorbike that I want to buy (Australian built, had estimated it saving about $1k a year of fuel/maintenance costs compared to my current bike + saving the cost of public transport) and worked out that it would take a year to save for. I decided to look at ways to cut costs and get better returns, including trying to find answers to things like 'Where did the rich put their money?' and 'What do super funds to to generate the returns they do and can I do what they are doing?' That is what put me onto shares.
While I was still at Uni, I had done a little bit with bitcoin, bought low and sold lower (in hindsight I think I timed the bottom perfectly, just did the opposite of what I should have done) and so decided I was not the investing type (though now I know more about investing and speculating, I was speculating). My parents taught that the share market is just another form of gambling, where you are almost guarenteed to lose money. As I learnt more I realised that my parents' experience in shares was limited. Both mine and my parents' view of investors was to think of just the day-trade speculators and the high-frequency traders. I was taught that dividends were so irrelevant that nobody had shares just to get the dividends. I was taught that the share market had a massive cost of entry (in response to me questioning if I could buy a single share), where you would need to have at least $10k to even think about doing it. My first dip in was done mostly in ignorance when I started work deciding on an ethical fund with 2% fee (because 2% is low, right?). Made a similar decision with super (because everyone beat the market, they are all around the same. 2% seems to be a reasonable fee, right?).
So I was looking for ways to save money for a $10k bike. I started to look into shares again. I am not sure what I saw first, but it was related to returns of the share market. In the ensuing rabbit hole of research I landed on some info about FIRE (somewhere in coming across Bogle, Thornhill, ETFs including the indexed ones, and MMM) which has driven the rabbit hole even further. I discovered the implications of the maths behind saving $10-$30 a day (I think I have reduced my monthly spend down from $2k by a few hundred).
I also discovered that what I had known about shares was mostly wrong. I had never played the ASX stock market game, but I was curious about how to do well at it. As I now discovered, the game is only weeks long (plus other restrictions). The game was not rigged, it was just dumb. I now know that the proper way to play the stock market is not with waveform like daytrades, but with a much longer term view.
So, I now have a few thousand in shares, but still under $10k total. My self-imposed loan system is in an interesting state as the balance has been used to buy shares. I still want to buy the bike but the calculated savings compared to my current one have evaporated because: (a) I no longer have to appear at random places for interviews (b) my employer pays for my public transport costs and (c) Although I grew up riding a push-bike and have continued to do so, I was using my motorbike once a week and now has been reduced to less than once a week through increased pushbike riding.
I wasn't intending this to be that long, but it turned out that way.