Posts Tagged → Twentysomething

I am creating a budget.

One of the greatest tools that I have learned from seeing a therapist over the last year (exceptionally helpful – I would highly recommend it!) is assessing, daily, the circumstances that I can and cannot control.  It’s a helpful practice that allows me to direct my energy towards actions that can actually affect some change and to expend little on the inconsequential and incontrollable.  So, I’ve been focusing on firming up my finances – more specifically reforming my budget using practices like the snowball method, the 50/20/30 model, and multiple banking accounts for my discretionary spending and specific savings objectives.

The results can be found below, as depicted in these 100% accurate and mathematically correct visual representations of my budget as a 20-something and my budget as a 30-something.  The graphics are color-colored, of course, according to “needs,” “debts and savings,” and “wants”.

 

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Jen’s 20-Something Budget:

  • Rent that probably (definitely) contributes to gentrification
  • Eating Out
  • Groceries that will inevitably go bad from eating out
  • Books
  • Fucking Student Loans
  • “Savings” (to be raided at the end of the month)
  • Alcohol – Fun
  • Alcohol – Existential Crisis
  • Alcohol – Ladies Night in the Gayborhood on Tuesday (??!!) nights filled with awkward, semi-passive aggressive dancing

Definitely Outside Budget, but YOLO:

  • Travel – Budget level accommodations that play techno versions of Adele songs
  • Alcohol – Potlucks and 20s Themed Parties
  • Brunch

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Jen’s 30-Something Budget:

  • Rent for an apartment that should have gone to a nice Latino family, but instead went to you, you God damn yuppie
  • Eating out
  • Groceries that will inevitably go bad from eating out because, you know, change is slow and hard
  • Books
  • Therapist (actual person, not alcohol)
  • Fucking student loans
  • Savings (for future wedding, children, parents and potential collapse of the USA)
  • Alcohol – single 8 PM drink on a Friday night with long-term lesbian partner
  • Not-So-Sketch Travel
  • MALM dresser from Ikea

I am an adult solving pseudo-algebraic equations.

In January, I reached a milestone that, for many, is a cause for elation, despair, and the production of semi-racist television shows: I turned 25. Of course, on the day that I turned 25, my comprehension of the day’s significance was rather minimal – except that I had turned an age that was a multiple of five and, as we all know as fact, any number that is a multiple of five is vastly superior to multiples of two, three, or four.

Alas, I felt such a benchmark to be so trivial that I began to notate occasions that would justify the magnitude of this well-documented, important age. I have come up with five such occasions (this is intentional because, as we all know as fact, multiples of five are quite excellent) and have put them in very simple mathematical equations. The following are inequalities that prove that I have “come of age” – moments so poignant that they indicate my rise in maturation’s cruel, cruel echelon:

  • Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase beer. < Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase tampons.
  • Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases of a solid color – a deep, almost brooding violet that supposedly* reflects my disposition on life. > Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases containing cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts – a pattern that supposedly reflects my penchant for…cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts.
  • Wearing a prom dress to a wedding you are attending. < Wearing a Bridesmaid dress from a wedding to a prom that you are chaperoning.
  • Sipping a “Natural” Light in the basement of a dilapidated row house that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and assorted Kraft products as I ironically berate over-privileged, private college educated students. < Sipping a Tecate at a dive bar that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and locally, organically grown onions as I ironically berate hipsters in a pair of jeans that are, like, really, really (dangerously) tight.

*Editor’s Note: ”Supposedly” means “absolutely not”.