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For a year or so I've been keeping an ad hoc record (a text file!), to the best of my ability, of all my financial losses due to personal mistakes - so, moving
by ajkjk 10y ago
For a year or so I've been keeping an ad hoc record (a text file!), to the best of my ability, of all my financial losses due to personal mistakes - so, moving out of my old apartment a month late was a 1200$ mistake, and dropping and breaking my phone was a 200$ one. I'm also trying to keep track of very risky behavior that didn't become an actual financial loss: driving in NYC during the blizzard last year didn't actually lead to my car being damaged, or to requiring a tow, but the chance of one of those happening was at least substantial, probably 20-50% - so it's a financial error of a few hundred dollars, maybe, anyway (this doesn't have to be precise).
I've learned from this that I lose far more money to incidental errors than I realized. Lots of small expenses like parking tickets, breaking things, misplanning my day and paying for Lyft/Uber or other luxuries to make up for lost time, buying things I already own, etc - it all really adds up.
But a few days ago I mentioned this to a friend, and after a second of thought she just said, "well, isn't it nice that all your mistakes can just be fixed with money?"
- ianai 10y agodid you remind her that you were only tracking financial mistakes?
- ajkjk 10y agoI should've finished with how it hit me: that I found the statement pretty powerful because, indeed, most of everything that had gone wrong or been stressful in my life that year was in that file. It was a reminder of how fortunate I've been.
- mixmastamyk 10y agoYes, not looking for sympathy but as a note for others. Recently a loved one of mine passed away very quickly, which I missed, and it put everything in perspective. No amount of money in the world (times ten) can fix such a mistake.
- ianai 10y agoI'm sorry for your loss. There's much more to the world than money. There's also many more ways to make a mistake than financial misfortunes.
- int_19h 10y agoI have to say, this all sounds extremely familiar. I didn't reach the same conclusion by consciously tracking expenses; it was actually in the process of fixing of one of those mistakes by throwing money at it when it suddenly hit me: "What would I be doing right now if I were living paycheck to paycheck? That would have been much, much more painful. Oh..."
- germinalphrase 10y agoAnother way of thinking about this is the phrase: it's expensive being poor. If you don't have the excess income to absorb these small mistakes/oversights/misfortunes then there are secondary effects (job loss, civil fines, court fees, etc.) that can destroy you financially. Edit: butchered my phrase
- zem 10y ago"expensive being poor", you mean?
- walshemj 10y agoNo its the Sam Vimes boot theory. "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness" A real word example is my Barbour jacket cost around $600 but it will last 30 years
- cbhl 10y agoWhen I took a problem-solving class in college, they broadly categorized problems into three types (allegedly in increasing order of difficulty to solve): problems that can be solved with money, problems with processes, and problems with people.
- zajd 10y agoSeems pretty weak. You need all three to do anything. Seems like a weak backdoor argument that "money doesn't matter when it comes to the hard things" (as long as your hard things don't take money)
- cbhl 10y agoThe key takeaway I had from that course was "money can solve more problems than you think, so it should be the first problem-solving strategy that you consider". This was pretty counter-intuitive in college, when I always felt like I didn't have enough money, but just knowing that this was a possible way of solving many classes of problems changed the way I approached decision-making in my later life (e.g. when picking my first job out of college).
- adamnemecek 10y agoDid the class have a book?
- ritchiea 10y agoI can relate to this. Growing up poor and originally working in nonprofits out of college I experienced a lot of stress about money and about making the kind of mistakes you listed. Getting a parking ticket was a huge deal. Today I am much more financially comfortable and I don't think I'm less responsible, just less stressed about the consequences of when I eventually make a common mistake like misreading a parking sign.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 10y agoI call this my 'idiot expense' account, after this Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Idiot+Expense http://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Idiot+Expense