To me, what you’re describing is a rather strict budget.
It’s similar to the old style of budgeting where you pay for everything in cash out of envelopes. So, you have a “rent” envelope and a “food” envelope, and etc, and you cash your paycheck, and put specific amounts into each envelope, and that’s all you can spend on that until the next paycheck.
Only in your case, it’s like you only have one envelope labeled “absolute necessities”, and almost everything went in there.
By the way, when you’re poor, it’s probably important to be able to spend any extra money like you did. It’s one of the traps of being poor, but it’s very difficult and unrewarding to live a life of complete deprivation.
It is important. Extreme austerity kills the soul. We couldn’t afford an envelope haha.
I think the worst one, worse than electricity getting cut off (we had well water so at least we could go manually pump), worse than half a bar s bologna sandwich every day for a while, was the time my dad got a decent check but we didn’t have the money to get gas to go cash it. We had to live on beans (who has two thumbs and nearly shits himself inside out every time he eats more than a spoonful of beans? This guy) for two days while we waited for a family member to get back in town to lend dad a few bucks to get gas to drive into town.
I guess my point was that I had no idea how to budget because the only thing I ever saw was survival, not real budgeting. But then I got lost in an ADHD trip down memory lane.
To me, what you’re describing is a rather strict budget.
It’s similar to the old style of budgeting where you pay for everything in cash out of envelopes. So, you have a “rent” envelope and a “food” envelope, and etc, and you cash your paycheck, and put specific amounts into each envelope, and that’s all you can spend on that until the next paycheck.
Only in your case, it’s like you only have one envelope labeled “absolute necessities”, and almost everything went in there.
By the way, when you’re poor, it’s probably important to be able to spend any extra money like you did. It’s one of the traps of being poor, but it’s very difficult and unrewarding to live a life of complete deprivation.
It is important. Extreme austerity kills the soul. We couldn’t afford an envelope haha.
I think the worst one, worse than electricity getting cut off (we had well water so at least we could go manually pump), worse than half a bar s bologna sandwich every day for a while, was the time my dad got a decent check but we didn’t have the money to get gas to go cash it. We had to live on beans (who has two thumbs and nearly shits himself inside out every time he eats more than a spoonful of beans? This guy) for two days while we waited for a family member to get back in town to lend dad a few bucks to get gas to drive into town.
I guess my point was that I had no idea how to budget because the only thing I ever saw was survival, not real budgeting. But then I got lost in an ADHD trip down memory lane.