How to Curb Emotional Spending
How to Curb Emotional Spending
by Jessica | Aug 17, 2020
Making the decision to work part-time was a hard pill to swallow. I decided to give up 50% of my income to work 3 days/week at a less stressful job. I was sure that it would greatly improve our lives. Given my mental health challenges, living a happier and healthier life was the highest priority. Speeding up our timeline to reach financial independence was lower on the list. I had no idea how much this decision would improve our lives.
I went from working 50+ hours/week at a toxic job to 24 hours/week in a great work environment. I cut my commute in half and no longer needed to face traffic, as I started taking public transportation to work. I now have 30+ hours of my life back every week!
I have been able to: Focus on my mental and physical well-being (including sleeping 8+ hours per night); Learn to manage my anxiety; Work on passion projects; Focus on my relationships with friends and family; Not feel like I needed to rush through everything just to get onto the next thing; Over the course of a year, I completely recovered from burnout.
I vividly remember having friends over for Thanksgiving and seeing how exhausted and burned out everyone was. I remembered that feeling, where every action felt like a slog. Instead, I was full of energy and happily did most of the cooking and cleaning.
Beyond feeling 100 times happier and more energized, something really surprising happened. We realized that we spent a lot less money. When I say a lot less, I mean a lot less. We spent $17,000 less in the first year after I quit my toxic job and went back to work part-time. That comes out to be an average of $1,400/month.
Life felt the same. Actually, life felt better. We decided to dig into our spending to figure out how this was possible. We had expected our costs to increase because of my health issues. They had, but we still spend $17,000 less.
We finally dug into our spending to understand what was going on. We realized that we spend significantly less in 4 categories: Groceries, Restaurants, Travel, and General Merchandise
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