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If you don't spend money and bars and clubs, what do you spend money? that's a good first step.
Like RiceGrad asked, what are you spending money on? I assume you never cook and only eat out, so that is a great way to cut back. Other than that, assuming you're moving to PE, corp dev, or a similar role, it's not like you're going into the poor house.
what kind of whip you riding? no need for anything over $30k. cars (followed by insurance) are usually the first thing people blow their money on
Are you retarded? Spend less money. You need food and shelter, not a Bimmer.
Can someone ban this buffoon from WSO? Everything I have ever seen him post is either idiotic or unnecessarily angry and aggressive
Ban? Who cares what he posts. It's an online forum... no safe spaces on WSO (:
bro I have quite the loyal following here talk shit get hit
@Macro Bruin sits down when he takes a leak. He also talks in your backswing.
I'd recommend spending less money across the map.
First thing I would suggest is tracking your current expenses, you can't cut back if you don't know where your dollars are going . A great personal budget template was shared by another user a few months back, try searching for that. When you honestly input your expenses, the numbers won't lie and you can be realistic about where you are over spending.
A few generic things to cut down costs meaningfully:
Rent - you don't need to live in a sick place by yourself. Trying finding a roommate, your monthly rent will be one of most meaningful savings.
Start cooking. Not only is it way less expensive, it's also much more healthy. Not to mention enjoyable.
Set a realistic budget for yourself and stick to it. Much easier said than done. There is nothing wrong with treating yourself, but be smart about it
I second everything Trainer said. I moved recently from a nice loft downtown to a place just outside of downtown with a roommate and cut my rent in half. The other big thing that was easy to cut back on was coffee. I love cold brew coffee so I bought a maker on Amazon and now my coffee cost went from $3.25/ea. to ~$0.96/ea. Those two wins slashed almost $1k off my monthly spend.
To find out where your money is going, most banks and credit card companies allow you to download your transactions in csv. Do that, make a grouper for the stores to categories. Then throw it in a pivot and figure out where your money is being spent. Super easy and took me about 5 mins to identify my biggest money sucks.
This, and another way to do it is to install an app like Mint (tracks budgets). Found it helps out quite a bit in understanding money sucks.
Another great app is Acorns, which rounds your spending and invests the spare change in ETFs.
Or use Mint.com, great interface and syncs with all your accounts and cards
I already split rent, cook some of the time and don't have car, but definitely am spending way too much each month on everything else. Each time I look at my bank statements, it's not a good feeling...
I think part of the problem was that in banking, I adopted an attitude of "it's OK, you can afford it" without having any rigor over whether my spending was reasonable (in part because I was so pressed for time so needed to pay whatever). I've gotten to the point where I honestly don't know what a reasonable amount of money is for a sandwich or dry cleaning.
Does anyone have any good tools for budget tracking? I have a joint account with my partner and also individual accounts, so I would probably need to track all of these to sort out spending.
$100 a sandwich is the going rate
I don't know. My analysts spend ~$15 a sandwich for lunch daily, 5x a week * 4 weeks a month = $300 post-tax, /.65 ~= $500 pre-tax. Close to 10% salary on lunch. If you do that for breakfast and coffee, too, it's 20%. If you account for unavoidable fixed costs (rent, transport) then it balloons to a larger portion of your discretionary budget.
Times have changed for junior bankers after many firms stopped comping meals.
OP, type "Personal Finance Budget Template" in the search bar. Overandout shared a great resource for the community to use. It provides a transparent and honest look at your monthly spend, assuming you input your cash flow properly. Highly recommend giving it a try
Cut all wants and minimize costs on needs. Allow for some splurge money, so you don't lose your mind.
Cut the LVMH bags, the $10 SBUX, the Tiffany's shit and what-not. Trust me, VS bras are no different from the ones you might get at Walmart.
I went through your previous threads and noticed that you were thinking of chucking banking for quite some time now. I suggest you take some time off first, if you don't have something immediately lined up. A trip across the world (or Europe/Muricca/SE Asia) on a shoestring teaches frugality and adaptability.
Also, sell stuff you may not need on eBay and the like. Stop eating the $10 burger and instead, start cooking at home. IDK about NY, but a city like London pinches your pocket via transportation costs - and the Tube sucks. So I ended up buying a cycle for my commute. Takes 20 minutes, but I don't sweat through, so it's cool for me (although my Navy SEALS down under might be taking quite the hitting). The cost savings were immense.
Don't buy a car. Don't have kids yet. Look for cheaper, more interesting date options.
Ask your partner to throw money at you while you give him a BJ, then gather all the Benjamins and leave him hanging.
Also, find a sugardaddy. If you're a 9 or a 10, I'll put you on my list as a favour to you.
cut back from 3 butlers to 1.
Easiest way is to make a budget.
Start with your paycheck, deduct everything that is a necessary expense/bill/food.
From remaining amount, determine how much to allocate to non-essential expenses, for example clothes or eating out.
From that remaining amount, allocate amounts to longer term/non-recurring expenses, such as haircuts or doctors bill.
Amount remaining should go into savings.
If you don't have any for savings and want some for savings, adjust the top expenses.
Example: Paycheck-$1,000 Heating- (-50) Food- (-100) Cable (-50) Clothes- (-30) Spending- (-100) Restaurants (-50) Haircut -(-10) Doctors -(-20)
Remaining/Savings -$590
http://reddit.com/r/personalfinance
Spend some time on that sub and pretty soon you will be clipping coupons and buying all your clothing at goodwill (nothing wrong with that). Or just search through IlliniProgrammer's post history.
Downgrade to hand-jobs only?
Lol at everyone commenting and not realizing that the OP is a woman.
how does that change anything?
They spend more on their upkeep than men.
Women can still get hand jobs
Wake up dood
Here are my thoughts, hope some of these are helpful.
Make a budget. Essentially, figure out how much you are making each month, and then track your expenses and see where all your money goes. Biggest thing that stands out to most people is that they spend too much on eating out and they buy a lot of useless things they do not need.
Going to the bar - Pre-game as much as you can at home. Drinks at the bar are expensive.
Car - Too many people spend way to much money on cars. Seriously think about if you a) need a car at all or b) need to spend as much money on a car as everyone else. I sold my car a year ago, used the proceeds to pay off one of my student loans, and now I take the bus to work every day. Saved us about $200/month. If you finance your car and are paying for full insurance coverage, not having a car can save you anywhere from $400-600/month. By not driving to work, I get a bunch of free-time on the bus to check e-mail, FB, study notecards for CFA exam, etc. My wife's car is a 1998 Ford Taurus with 70k miles. It will probably last us at least another 5-7 years, and the insurance payment is $25/month. I have not once wished I had a car to drive to work. Having just one, cheap and affordable car has worked perfect for us. She uses it to drive to work and then we both use it for groceries, networking events, date nights, etc. If someone wants to judge me because I didn't finance a $70k Tesla right out of college, that's fine with me.
Rent / Mortgage - Seriously consider how much you are paying for housing costs and if you feel like you are getting what you are paying for. A huge thing to consider how close you live to work and what kind of amenities are close by. I am a 15 minute bus ride from work, close to downtown, and close to groceries, restaurants, etc. I could easily afford to spend an extra $1,000/month on housing costs and live directly in the middle of downtown, but instead I got a great deal on a house in a neighborhood close to downtown that was a 8 minute walk to four different bus lines and it has worked perfectly for me.
Car Insurance - Pay as a lump-sum, not monthly. Paying annually or bi-annually saves you somewhere around 10%, which could be anywhere from $50-100 depending on how big your insurance payment is.
Travel - I save tons of money on travel by taking advantage of credit card points. I use my CC's to pay for as much of my everyday expenses as I can, and then pay the balance off every month. Whenever I find a CC with a good sign-up bonus, I sign-up, spend the $ necessary to get the "minimum spend sign-up bonus", and then stop using the card and sign-up for a new one. I've saved about $3,000 on travel over the last year alone with this strategy. Check out http://reddit.com/r/churning for some good discussion on the best ways to do this.
Debt - I made it a priority to pay off debt as soon as I could. When I sold my car and paid-off one of my student loans, it immediately gave us an extra $100/month to work with because we didn't have the monthly payment.
Eating Out - Stop eating out all the time and learn how to cook. See below. On average, my wife and I eat out about once a week, seems to work well for us.
Groceries - Buy your own groceries and spend some time on the weekends preparing meals to take to work. My wife does most of this for us and it's great. We make homemade breakfast burritos and breakfast sandwiches that we freeze and take to work. I also make us a smoothie every morning for breakfast. My wife and I take turns cooking dinner each night, and I take leftovers most of the time for lunches at work. Our leftovers are always awesome meals that are WAY better than the stuff I would get if I went out to eat for lunch everyday.
Personal Care / Beauty Products - Look up how to make your own beauty/personal care products from scratch. My wife does this and we save a decent chunk of money there. Also, try to have low-maintenance hairstyles. My wife stopped getting her hair done a lot when she realized how much it costs (hint: it's expensive)
Netflix/HBO/Hulu - Share an account with someone. I pay for none of these yet have access to all of them (do have a Spotify account, that's worth it for the custom weekly playlists).
Cable - Cable is not worth the money in my opinion and I can't wait until the cable model comes crashing down. You can find pretty much anything online or through the streaming services above. If you are looking at a way to save money, seriously consider cancelling your $100/month cable bill.
Internet - Don't overpay for internet and don't rent a modem from the cable company. You can find a good modem and router for about $100 on Craigslist and they will last you at minimum for a few years. Comcast was charging me $10/month to rent a modem, so my $100 investment last year is looking to have a pretty good IRR/NPV.
Phone - Stop buying a new phone immediately when they come out. Get an older model. My iPhone 4s lasted me for three years. Yea, it was a little slow, but it got the job done. I upgraded to an iPhone 6 when it came out and have used that for the last two years. Also, you do not need an unlimited data plan. If you think you'll run out of data with one of the lower data plans, use WIFI as much as you can and stop streaming Netflix while you are on the go. Spotify premium comes in handy in this case, you can download songs to your phone so it really cuts down on data use.
Pets - They can be very expensive, and they are more expensive the bigger they are due to food costs. I have a 20-25 lbs. beagle that costs us $62/month when you consider food, a few new toys a couple times a year, and her annual $250~ vet check up.
If you feel the need to make a random impulse purchase, do not buy it right away. Wait a few days and then come back to it. If you think it will actually add value to your life, then go ahead and buy it.
Clothes - You do not need 100's of clothes, 30+ pairs of shoes, etc. Also, focus on quality of clothes, not quantity. My wife and I each paired down our wardrobes and we love it. We also each have a sub-account in our savings account where we each contribute $30/month that we use to buy new clothes. I have about $80 in mine right now, and will probably buy a new $60 leather belt from this guy I found online that makes them by hand that will last me 10-15 years (vs. spending $30 on a cheap belt made in China at JC Penny which will last me 6 months). We each have enough every day clothes to last us about 2 weeks, and we usually do laundry every 5 days or so. We go through and donate old clothes whenever we feel like we don't wear them anymore. It feels AWESOME looking in your closet and not seeing a bunch of old clothes you never wear. Additionally, you can find things a lot easier when you only have 15 items on hangers vs. 100 items.
Brilliant advice, thanks.
Right but your life seems to suck dude
How so? Not everyone enjoys the models and bottles life that some posters on here glamorize. Plus, there is a lot more to my life than the limited advice I gave in a post to someone who asked on how to cut back on her expenses.
@WpgJets does churning cards mess with your credit?
It depends, but for the most part it actually ends up helping your credit score. My credit has gone up from 740 when I started two years ago to about 780 now. My wife's was 640 when we started and we have gotten it up to 760 now. Obviously your credit score takes a hit when you sign up for a new card, but it's not even that big of a dip.
Signing up for multiple cards actually ends up helping you over time, because the biggest weighting in your credit score is your "utilization ratio" (Outstanding balance on all cards / total available credit on all cards). The banks like to see this below 30%, but they also like to see it above 0% to show you actually use your cards and they can make some money off of you. Back when I started, I had total credit lines of maybe $2k. I'm at $45k right now. So if I were to put $1k on a card two years ago, my ratio would be 50%, now it would be 2%. I have random bills hitting my card every few days (internet, groceries, phone, etc.) so my utilization is always above 0%, and I am pretty much always working on getting a bonus. Usually I only sign up for cards with bonuses with the equivalent of about $400~ worth of value, sometimes its cash back and sometimes it's enough Airline or Hotel points for a few free nights or free flights.
Also, the more accounts you have open, the better your credit gets (to a certain extent, obviously don't have 100 cards) because it shows you're responsible with your money. Your score is also affected by your "average age of account", which is exactly how it sounds. Whenever you open an account, that average age goes down because you just added a new line of credit that's literally 0 days old. At this point my wife and I each have 4-5 cards that are around 1-2 years old, plus I have a few that are 6-8 years old, so opening a new card barely moves my average account age.
Also another cool benefit is if you have a spouse, use their SS# and sign up for each card again in their name. Anytime I find a good card, I get the bonus twice because I sign one of us up, get the bonus, and rinse and repeat with the other SS#.
Banks want you to think this will hurt your credit but it actually ended up helping mine. Even if you don't want to churn the bonuses, opening 2-3 CC's and using them responsibly for a few years will pretty much guarantee you're in the lowest rate bracket when you settle down and want to apply for a mortgage. The only real negative from churning is that my home owners insurance went up about $40/month because the annual renewal came right after I had just applied for two cards. Apparently they don't like seeing recent credit pulls. Going to re-pull in a few months and get it lowered.
http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/gwyneth-paltrows-goop-fea…
For a start, stop buying these $15k 24 karat gold dildos that gwenith paltrow is peddling
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