This week, The Wall Street Journal reports that population mobility is the lowest its ever been—or, at least, it’s the lowest it’s been since we started tracking.

From Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg’s “Struggling Americans Once Sought Greener Pastures, and Now They’re Stuck:”

When opportunity dwindles, a natural response — the traditional American instinct — is to strike out for greener pastures. Migrations of the young, ambitious and able-bodied prompted the Dust Bowl exodus to California in the 1930s and the reverse migration of blacks from Northern cities to the South starting in the 1980s.

Yet the overall mobility of the U.S. population is at its lowest level since measurements were first taken at the end of World War II, falling by almost half since its most recent peak in 1985.

Why aren’t people moving out of economically depressed rural areas? Three reasons, and I bet you can already guess what they are:

1. They can’t afford it. Moving costs money, and moving to a city with a higher cost of living costs even more money.
2. When they try to apply for jobs in these cities before moving—instead of taking the plunge and hoping the job follows—they get passed over in favor of applicants who already live there. Without a job lined up, they can’t afford to move.
3. They also can’t afford to leave behind a supportive community to move to a city where that type of community rarely exists.

Civic leaders here say extended networks of friends and family and a tradition of church groups that will cover heating bills, car repairs and septic services — often with no questions asked — also dissuade the jobless and underemployed from leaving.

There are a lot of other, smaller reasons listed in the article—a hair stylist, electrician, or teacher might have to get relicensed if they cross state lines, and that’s another expense—but it essentially boils down to “it costs a lot to uproot your life, especially when you’re no longer young.”

And then there’s what the WSJ calls the “cultural divide.” They give a few examples of small-town residents who tried to leave their hometowns but felt uncomfortable around everything from marijuana use to casual sex to panhandlers. (If you read the Washington Post’s “Disabled and Disdained,” you know that panhandling is a rural thing as well.)

It’s hard to read that and not think “tough it out, y’all,” but there is a difference between moving from a small community to a larger one, and I know that because I’ve done it. In a small community, everyone is part of your group. Even if you don’t agree with everything everyone else does, you’ve shared enough experiences that you feel connected.

In a larger community, you have to figure out where your group is, and sometimes your people can be hard to find. You don’t have to hang out with the legal weeders or the craft beerdos if you don’t want to. Cities are large and contain enough subcultures that your people probably exist—it’s just that you might only ever find a handful of them, and you might only ever see each other once a month, and yes, that’s going to be a huge difference from seeing everyone you know every day.

But I’m getting off track. The point is that the fewest number of people can afford to move to where the jobs and opportunities are—and if they can’t afford to move, they can’t afford much of anything else, either.

Why We Don’t Just “Go Where the Jobs Are” was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My partner and I are the quintessential DINKS: dual income, no kids. We certainly aren’t busy in the way that people with children are, but we feel busy a lot of the time, and we allow that feeling to make us a little lazier than we should be with our money. We don’t think of ourselves as wasteful spenders, but we don’t really limit ourselves by putting dollar amounts on each spending category.

Not that we haven’t tried. When we got married two years back, we set up a Mint account along with our joint banking accounts. Mint does a fair job of automatically categorizing purchases by budget line item. Yes, you’ll have to reallocate a few transactions by hand—Mint’s allocation system isn’t perfect—but it is easy to scan a month’s worth of transactions, make sure you recognize them all, and confirm that Mint has correctly allocated them into food, travel, or utilities.

Once all the transactions are allocated or reallocated, Mint creates a monthly budget for you. You can modify Mint’s budget, but the initial numbers are auto-generated based on the status quo of how you spend your money.

Mint, for example, gave us a $460 groceries budget. Not because that was how much we wanted to spend on groceries, but because that was how much we had been spending on groceries per month. (If that seems high to you, it does to me too—I make myself feel better by remembering we throw at least one party or dinner per month, and try to supply enough food/drink for everyone.)

We review our transactions each month, and we look hopefully at the budgets, discovering that most of them are just barely under the amount Mint expects, with a few categories usually going over and turning from green to the dreaded red. We don’t impose any consequences on ourselves, though; we’ll say “we should eat at home more,” or “no weekend trips next month,” but there’s pretty much no follow-through.

Right now we’re at the halfway point in terms of tracking our money: we’ve started paying attention to how much we spend, and just doing that was enough for us to put away some savings for retirement and start saving for an upcoming car purchase. But we haven’t yet done the second half of budgeting: the part where we—not Mint—make our budget, allocate dollars to line items, and stop spending when we reach those amounts.

Why is this so hard for us? I can think of a few reasons. I don’t want to restrict what my partner does with his money, for example. What if, for instance, I spent a ton in one budget category and he was forced to cut back when he wanted to buy something? The communication required to make that work seemed like a headache, especially when we were making all our bills and in no immediate distress.

I also felt some resistance to the notion of scarcity: we aren’t operating that close to the edge, per se, so while the idea of “saving more” in general sounds good, whenever it means “skipping a friend date at the brewery,” it feels unacceptably restrictive.

Finally, I felt like most of our non-trivial purchases weren’t predictable budget line items. Car repairs, charitable donations, taxes, and insurance bills all snuck up on me, and I didn’t have a good way to allocate money to those types of expenses. One budget seemed doable, but a different budget every month? Punishing.

What we need now is a solution that makes us work a little harder, but not uncomfortably hard: something that won’t take a lot of time (because we’ll abandon it), that will force us to confront our overall excessive spending habits, and will leave us the flexibility to not allocate every dollar to a spending category.

So we’ve come up with an experiment, one last attempt, to see if we can save more money without going all the way over to the budgeting side.

Our plan is to go from leaving most of our money in our checking account all the time, to transferring any extra to savings every month as soon as my paycheck hits. It’ll look like this:

—Last day of month: previous checking balance + $2,200 (my monthly take-home)

—First day of month: $2,200 (because everything else is now in savings)

This way, we’ll be working ONLY from that paycheck. We’ll have $2,200 to spend, and that’s it. There will be no obscuring how much we’re spending and saving; every month, the number we transfer will be the amount we saved. The only snarly thing will be if we have major unexpected expenses, which we had a ton of in the beginning of the marriage, but I’m hoping we’ll get a few months without those… and we can just as easily make an emergency transfer back, if we must.

This method is intended to lay completely bare how much we’re spending each month. No more telling myself “this is an odd month” or “we won’t have to buy this next month.” Watching the account balance dwindle all month will help me, I hope, create a generalized scarcity rather than a specific scarcity: “we need to spend less money, so I’ll choose to cook tonight instead of going out,” instead of “we’ve already spent the $10 in the movie night budget, so we can’t have another Redbox film.” Those may seem similar, but to my mind, they feel like the difference between a proactive change and a reactive restriction.

If this doesn’t work, though, I think we’re converting to the real budgeting religion. I know that budgets work well, especially for people who are working with a lower income and want to stretch every dollar. It’s time for us to stop letting DINK-hood make us waste money, especially because at any time we could garner more expenses or lose an income, and I’d hate to have meager savings when tough times hit just because I couldn’t figure out my own budgeting practices.

Laura Marie is a writer and teacher in Ohio. She blogs about family recipes, among other things, at Recipe in a Bottle.

This story is part of The Billfold’s Halfway Series.

Confessions From the Sorta-Budgeting Life was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Celia (not her real name) is a 30-year-old nonprofit director in Lansing, Michigan.

So, Celia, how much money are you making?

My husband and I make around $150,000 year combined.

$150,000 a year? That’s what that Priceonomics survey considered “rich.”

What Do Rich People Read Online?

Do you feel rich?

Kind of. I feel like I have enough money to live very comfortably in the city I’m in right now.

Nice! What does that mean? Is it, like, homeownership, or…?

Yes, we’ve owned two houses in Lansing. We downsized in May to save even more money.

I think part of the reason that I don’t necessarily feel rich is because I had a lot of expenses until recently. I never got to see a lot of that money. More specifically, I received a promotion in April 2016 that bumped up my pay by $12,000 a year. And until October of 2016 I was paying really aggressively on my private student loans—about $1,200 a month. So, around nine months ago, I started to feel like “wow, I have money that I don’t know what to with.” But that’s we made the decision to start really padding our savings account.

What’s motivating you to save more? Are you saving for something?

That’s the big question! Previously, we were always saving to pay off loans and build our emergency fund. Just last month we realized that we’re pretty much set on those two things. I think what I need to come to terms with now is actually allowing myself to spend the money!

Maybe a dream vacation? 😉

On Once-in-a-Lifetime Vacations

Dream vacation for sure. Or just taking better small vacations. Travel is at the very top of the priority list.

Right now our financial situation feels good but a little unsettling. I keep trying to figure out what we’re missing. We haven’t yet maxed out our 401(k)’s but that’s on the list of things to set up.

How are your retirement savings looking? Do you just have the 401(k)s or additional savings as well?

Right now, I put in 18 percent (well, I put in 10 percent and my employer matches 8 percent), and my husband puts in 10 percent. We also have around $80,000 in stocks that have just grown over the years. It’s a little embarrassing to say that I don’t know much about that. My husband had the account set up when we met, and I just let him do his thing with it. No money is actively being contributed to that account. We did go to a financial adviser last year, when we were contributing a little less, and he said that we’re all set to retire, even retire early.

Really! I’m impressed. Did he mean, like, retire at 40 or retire at 60? 😀

I think the goal was retiring at 55. I’m also impressed, but a little skeptical of this guy. I’m looking to find a second opinion, haha.

That’s fair. Personal finance has nothing if not plenty of opinions.

Exactly!

It sounds like you’re pretty good at living under your means, then. Do you have any outstanding debt? You mentioned student loans…?

I paid off my private student loans. I still have about $8,000 in federal loans that I pay the minimum on each month.

Have you done the math on the advantage of paying them down more quickly vs. The Value of Debt-ing it and saving up a larger pile of liquid cash and/or investments?

I haven’t! This is a conversation my husband and I always have when we’re talking about what we should do with our money. I figure they’re not hurting anyone and he wants to just throw our money at them. It seems like neither of us is willing to do the math, so we’re at a standstill. We have a $16,000 car loan, too, that we’ve also come to a standstill on.

I can’t get over the idea of just stockpiling the money now that I reached my original goal of paying off my private student loans.

I guess it’s all about what you want to do next: get debt-free, invest more cash, bulk out those retirement accounts, take more trips…

It sounds like you have a lot of options.

Very true. It doesn’t help that I’m not great at making decisions.

We do have a plan to be mortgage-free in four years, though. So I guess that’s where we’re throwing our money right now.

Excellent!

It’s super exciting to me. We bought a really beautiful 1920s house in February 2014 for more money that we intended to spend, even though it was still well within our means. We realized last year that our priorities didn’t line up with spending the money the house needed to keep it nice. We were so lucky to be able to sell this spring and make about $10,000.

We bought a slightly less nice house in a slightly less nice neighborhood for $69,000 in May. We put 20 percent down and pay $1,200 a month. The actual payment is only around $400 a month. The goal is to have it paid off by Summer 2021. I did do the math on that one!

You’ve mentioned priorities more than once — how do you determine those priorities? Do you reevaluate them over time?

Yeah, it’s something that’s talked about often in our household. It seems like there’s typically one big goal, and then once it’s been hit, we move on to the next one. (Though this conversation has me thinking that maybe there ought to be more than one goal at a time.)

And your mortgage is your current goal.

Yep.

Well, I hope you get it paid off quickly and easily!

Me too!

Just a few more questions: first, what do you think you do well financially and what do you wish you did better?

Despite having plenty of money to work with, I’m actually really good at budgeting. I served as an AmeriCorps member for two year right after college, so I know what it’s like to make next to nothing. Learning to budget (and set goals) is pretty much a necessity when you’re making $12,000 a year. I definitely could use some improvement in planning for the future. It’s all very intimidating to me.

Starting with that second opinion about your retirement, LOL.

Hahaha exactly!

Last question then: what advice do you have for Billfold readers?

Gosh, I knew you were going to ask this, and I’ve been trying to come up with something for a few days. I couldn’t come up with much, but my advice is to take other peoples’ advice with a grain of salt. Or maybe even tell them to shove it. I’ve spent a lot of money on things you’re “supposed” to spend money on (including that first home purchase) and lived to regret it. You do you and don’t let anyone tell you differently!

How a Goal-Oriented Saver in Lansing Does Money was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I love searching the Google news tab for “money,” because it turns up the best stories. Here are three:

President Trump Can’t Try to Increase the White House’s Property Value, and I’m Fine With That

This is how much the White House is worth in 2017

Trump, who also lives in a gold-adorned $100 million penthouse in New York City, according to Travel & Leisure Magazine, said before he was elected that he doesn’t plan to change much in his new home, if anything just doing a few touch-ups. Also, some of the more historic areas in the home can’t be changed at all.

Even if he did change parts of the home, it wouldn’t do much to the value of it, Wacksman said. For other single-family homes, changing square footage or features of the properties could have an effect on their values, but the White House would likely not be impacted, he said.

Every sentence in those two paragraphs is amazing. The fact that MarketWatch credited Travel & Leisure Magazine for reporting that President Trump “also lives” in a gold penthouse. (MarketWatch: you know you don’t have to cite common knowledge facts, right?) The idea that the White House’s resale value “would likely not be impacted” by adding… what? A deck off the South Lawn?

Also, um… I shouldn’t be worried that we’re discussing the White House as something that can be bought and sold, right?

All Other Email Signatures Are Wrong, Thanks!

This Is the ONLY Way You Should Sign Your Emails

This article has nothing to do with money, but it showed up under “money news” and I’m sharing it because “the only way you should sign your emails” is with the word thanks, which… well, if you’ve ever received an email from me, you know why I was thrilled to get that news.

(When I was in undergrad I read some blog post by a professor about how students should only use the word “thanks” when emailing her, not “best regards” or “sincerely,” because to sign an email with anything but acknowledgment that you’re asking someone else to take time out of their day to pay attention to you is inappropriate. So… I got into the habit.)

Everyone Makes the Same Money Mistake, Guess What It Is

After 10 years as a financial planner, I've realized almost everyone gets the same thing wrong about money

You gonna click the link? Want to know what everyone gets wrong about money? I’ll spoil it for you: THEY SPEND MORE THAN THEY EARN.

Today in Money News was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been job-hopping for a lifetime. My ratio is one job/contract of work per year of life, since birth. (I’m 38.) I’d had SO MANY JOBS. And I keep taking them, because everywhere I turn, I am curious, and still yearning. I want to know so many things, so many identities. I want to try on the world.

You can imagine that someone with a precise lack of a projected work path might not make a ton of money. You would be right. Money isn’t what propels me. Never has been. I want to be rich in experience only. (This is a half-lie. Traveling means a lot to me and it goes hand-in-hand with money, so I would like to maybe have a travel stipend, along with my stacked and varied experience.)

In the past few years, I have made some of the following rates per hour: $3.35 (waitressing), $16 (university temp job), $12 (receptionist) $9.28 (Starbucks) and b/t $30-$400 for contacted freelance writing, per submission.

I piece together paychecks like a patchwork quilt.

My lowest wage job right now is at Starbucks. At $9.28, it can take a nice long while to earn a nice-sized check. You can stand on your feet for a whopping eight hours and not even make a hundo to lean on when you end your shift. It can feel hard, and sometimes feels like it’s not totally worth it.

But Starbucks makes me happy. I LOVE coffee. And I LOVE people. (I can’t even believe it, but I really do.) I LOVE making coffee and serving coffee to people and drinking coffee and smelling coffee and opening up bags of coffee. I like handing the drinks out, and I like observing the joy they give others. I am addicted to coffee and the entire mystical energy field around it. Loving the thing I work with so much tends to make me super fun to be around. I sing a lot, and dance a little. I like to tag-team projects and even to sweep and mop—it’s so gratifying to see the dirt come up and the floor TURN SUDDENLY CLEAN! I can tell that people like working with me. (Also, sometimes they flat-out tell me that they do.)

My husband keeps asking me to quit — to take my earning potential elsewhere — but I keep telling him no.

I know I can earn more in another realm, but my clothes won’t smell as heady with the scent of a deeply roasted bean if I do. I stay, because it makes me happy.

And recently, life stepped up and taught me a big, fat money-making lesson:

YOU CAN GET PAID FOR SIMPLY BEING LIKABLE.

A few weeks ago, I picked up my check. I had made $30 in regular wages, all of which was then taken out in taxes. In addition, I had a random $75 credit on a separate line. Line description: Partner of the Quarter.

Oh, holy hell. I knew of Partner of the Quarter. I had voted in the past. I had longed for it to become my title, at some point. Partner of the Quarter is a title that all of the current employees in any given Starbucks store vote on quarterly. Four people per year are going to get called out as exemplary, through the eyes of their co-workers. That in and of itself is nice. But Starbucks takes it further. THEY PAID ME. They paid me for being liked by the people around me.

All these hourly wages I’ve had in the past couple years came after a salaried job I held for the seven years prior. I was making $50K when I left that puppy and decided to “start over.” Because I didn’t feel entirely happy. I was driving from Kentucky to Iowa, worried about finances and ready to start searching for my next employment, when a friend told me what her mom had said. “Oh my! The lucky people that will get to work with Kelly. They don’t even know what’s coming for them.” And I wondered — what if my only asset is me? Sounds great and all, but a nice and funny person without a solid skillset is really just one inch away from homelessness. You can’t make a living off of being cool.

Which is why I might have teared up a tiny bit, when I stared at that line on the check. I drove straight to the bank and deposited it. I decided I would spend that $75 however I wanted to. I wouldn’t even consider paying a bill. This was money for making it rain on myself.

I have earned hundreds of tiny paychecks over the course of my life, but none has ever meant quite as much as this one did. I believe I am a good worker, a strong worker, an ethical worker. I have a capable brain and above-average reasoning skills. But that isn’t the stuff that really matters — at least not in my book. And even though Starbucks pays me my lowest hourly wage, they are a company that comprehends that esteem in the workplace is worth a lot. It’s worth enough to show it with a little bit of money. And ultimately, it’s worth more than money can ever mean.

Kelly Green is a writer living in Iowa. She loves dogs easily, humans with some effort. She can be found at kellygrain.wordpress.com and on Twitter @kellygreeeeeen. (That’s six e’s, because her name is anything but unique.)

They Paid Me for Being Liked was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s Thursday, which means it’s time to Do 1 Thing.

Today I have a lot of tiny things to do before I go to Portland for the weekend. (I’ll be reading from The Biographies of Ordinary People at Another Read Through on Friday at 7 p.m., so if you’re in Portland, come say hey!)

I need to pack, get a bottle of wine as a host gift, take out the trash so it doesn’t stink up the place over the weekend, tweeze the mustache hairs off my face, you know, the usual stuff.

I’ll count the whole thing as “packing.”

How about you?

Do a Lot of Things was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month’s call for pitches comes by reader request: I’m looking for stories about money and relationships.

These can be stories about the way money influences romantic relationships, or stories about friendships, families, coworkers, roommates — and, yes, even your relationship to yourself.

I want to remind everyone that friends, exes, coworkers, and parents can and do read The Billfold, so please use discretion (and fake names) where appropriate.

Send pitches to notes@thebillfold.com with “money and relationships” in the subject line.

Call for Pitches: Money and Relationships was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Summers in New York are always full of sweltering humidity and the smell of trash melting in the rays of the sun, but something about this year seems especially brutal.

In an effort to make the most of the efforts of our window A/C unit, we’ve quartered off our living room by hanging sheets—an old trick my boyfriend, who has lived with window units and Brooklyn summers his whole life, brought with him to our shared apartment. What has resulted is what I jokingly like to refer to as our biodome, a perfectly temperate part of the apartment in which we spend almost all our time when we’re home.

Unfortunately, we cannot solely live in our living room. Which means I’ve been making a lot of financial decisions based on trying to find some comfort in this scorching summer heat. Not including the cost of running our air conditioner—which makes our energy bill double—here is how I spent my last $100:

Two Tickets to the NY Best Wings Fest Ultimate Championships: $27.20

With the high temperatures outside, it’s been hard getting up the motivation on the weekends to get out of the house. However, a friend who has a car was interested in going to the NY Best Wings Fest Ultimate Championships in Wantagh, and as someone who loves wings, I figured it would be a nice activity. A ticket to the festival gets you two wing samples at every stand. My boyfriend isn’t a big fan of chicken wings, so I bought his ticket. (I also intend to eat — I mean, “help him” — with some of his samples if he needs it.)

Luckily, we found a Groupon that offered tickets at half price. Plus, we got an extra 20 percent off coupon code, so we saved an additional $6.80.

Deli on Madison: $10.77

I met a friend near his office for lunch, and we were having trouble deciding where to go. We needed somewhere we could sit down to escape the heat, but it was prime lunchtime and most places were crowded. Luckily, the nearby deli had seating upstairs and also offered a good array of cold items are the buffet. A plate of cold noodles and sushi later, I was full of satisfying food and great conversation in sweet, sweet air conditioning.

Delivery.com: $19.49

Shamefully, I’ve been spending a lot of money on takeout this summer, since the kitchen can get incredibly hot even when the oven and stove aren’t on. Because I hadn’t defrosted any meat for dinner, I decided it was better to order Thai instead of sweating in the kitchen. We had a $2 off coupon code and $5 voucher for Delivery.com, so it wasn’t as big of an expense as it could’ve been.

Yimobra Memory Foam Bath Mat: $12.99

Our bath mat was already looking a little worn before we discovered it couldn’t hold up to the humid weather. Out of desperation, I ordered a new mat from Amazon. Many of the bath mats listed there were around the same price, around $10–15, but this one inexplicably came with three of those temporary wall hooks, which doesn’t hurt.

Uber: $8.54

In another attempt to get out of the house on the weekend, my boyfriend and I decided to spend an evening at the NY Aquarium during their pay-what-you-can hours (4–5 p.m.). The intent was to have a cheap evening out: we would go to the aquarium for an hour or so, walk around the Coney Island Boardwalk a little bit, and then have dinner. (We had been sitting on an Applebees gift card since Christmas.)

Of course, the best laid plans often go awry, and the mess that is the MTA and the NY subway system almost put an end to our plans. There was a derailment off our line earlier in the day and there were no southbound trains at our station. With the limited pay-what-you-can hours, we were strapped for time to get down to the aquarium, so I went ahead and ordered an Uber. It was an unplanned expense, but I was determined for us to still have our summer day date.

Applebees: $7.80

After a lovely time at the aquarium, mostly spent watching the otters playing around outside, we were surprisingly hungry. We walked down to the Applebees and got the 2 for $20 special where we split an appetizer and each had an entrée, along with some iced teas. The difference after the gift card came to about $3, and my boyfriend offered to leave the tip, but Applebees had a cashback offer on my debit card, so I told him I’d just put it all on my card. He told me I sounded like Tina Fey in that American Express commercial with Michael Che. I couldn’t argue with him.

Rita’s Ice: $8.70

On the way home, I thought it would be nice to take a quart of Italian ice home with us, so we stopped by the Rita’s by the train station. Unfortunately, Rita’s consistency is pretty soupy, and there were train delays going home — probably residual issues from the train issues earlier that day. By the time we rounded the corner on our way to the apartment, I pulled the Rita’s bag out of my tote bag to find that the contents had leaked through the paper bag and into my purse. No important paperwork or items in my tote bag were stained, but my NY ComicCon exclusive Kuchi Kopi tote bag now had red streaks of black cherry ice.

The ice refroze into a form that was edible later that night, though the heat was so bad that we had to refreeze it halfway through the quart so that we weren’t just drinking cherry soup.

Grubhub: $25.42

I wish I could lie and say that the purchase that put me over $100 was something other than takeout, but I totally caved and got us sandwiches the next day from the best sandwich place that delivers to us. Their delivery fee, sadly, is $5, but we had a free delivery code that took off $4 from the fee. I wasn’t thrilled to be spending more money on delivery, but I couldn’t argue the decision when I was eating a delicious turkey sandwich on our couch, sitting in front of the A/C, in our perfect little biodome.

Kimberly Lew is a writer, sweating it out in Brooklyn. www.kimberlylew.com

My Last $100: Too Darn Hot Edition was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So I just listened to the latest Oh My Dollar! podcast, and I want to talk about vacations.

You can buy anything you want, but not everything - Oh My Dollar!

Lillian Karabaic, whom we’ve interviewed on The Billfold before, is about to take a month-long trip during which she’ll travel from Dublin to Shanghai by train.

This is the type of once-in-a-lifetime trip that requires both significant planning and saving, and the podcast discusses how you can fund similar splurges by putting a bit of money aside every month.

Which… I mean, that’s the sensible way to do it. Of course you should set aside a small amount of money every month so you can go on a major vacation in two years.

But for every successfully funded splurge there’s, like, the first ten minutes of Up. Right?

It’s not that I think you shouldn’t save up for dream vacations, it’s just that the idea of saving for two years makes me really anxious. I don’t know what the world’s going to look like in two years, much less whether I will be in the position to take a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

What kind of work schedule will I have? Will I be in good health? Will my family members be in good health? Will there be any additions to my family that might change the way I spend my vacation time? Will my best friend decide to plan a destination wedding? Will I have met someone who will say they’re thrilled about the idea of me taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip by myself but be secretly disappointed that we’ve been dating for nearly two years and won’t be able to go on a big trip together for at least another year because this dream trip takes all of my vacation days and money?

(Notice that I didn’t include anything like “will my electric water heater break down” because you’re supposed to be saving for that in a different pile. The emergency fund and the splurge fund. Also the down payment fund or the new car fund or anything else you’re saving up for.)

The other question I had about this episode came from this interchange between Karabaic and co-host Will Romey, who dreams of someday taking a cargo ship to Tokyo:

KARABAIC: If you started working on it for next year you’d need to save around $300 a month to get there.

ROMEY: Which comes to about ten bucks a day.

KARABAIC: Ten bucks a day. Do you think you could do that?

ROMEY: Ten bucks a day would be doable. Well…

KARABAIC: It’s a little bit of a stretch, for most folks.

ROMEY: Ten bucks a day is a good chunk out of a budget. But that is a small enough, specific enough number that I think in a setting where that was something that I really wanted to do, I could look at that old fashioned on a cocktail menu and go “No, I want to go to Japan. Slowly.”

The only way you can figure out whether putting $10 per day towards a vacation is “doable” is by already knowing where your money is going. Are you currently spending more than $300 every month on completely discretionary purchases, or are you not? There’s certainly some fungibility with overhead costs, e.g. buying less meat or switching internet providers, but in most cases you’re looking at pulling your splurge money from non-overhead costs—and it isn’t as simple as saying you’ll skip cocktails unless you buy a cocktail (or the equivalent) every single day of the month.

Karabaic and Romey do discuss why saying “I’ll save an extra $10 per day” is overly ambitious for a lot of people—I mean, if we could, we’d already be doing it—and agree that a two-year savings plan might be a smarter choice. That also builds in some wiggle room; some months you might not be able to set aside the full $150, but other months might include windfalls that could be put towards your splurge goal.

But I hear that kind of plan and I think “Two years is too far out. What if something comes up and you never get to go?”

This is where I should mention that I’ve put vacations on credit cards—once on a zero-interest card that I paid off before the intro rate ran out, and once on a non-zero-interest card that took me longer than a month to pay off—and while paying interest on a trip was not my smartest financial move, going on the JoCo Cruise changed my life.

Which is kind of what you expect to happen, in a life. To change. Which is why I’m leaning towards booking your dream trips while you can.

What about you?

On Once-in-a-Lifetime Vacations was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember how CNBC was #6 on the list of websites that rich people read? Turns out they have articles for the wannabe rich as well:

• 5 hard things you have to do if you want to be rich
• 5 habits to give up right now if you want to be rich

Both of these recent posts include a list of tips and tricks that should launch us straight towards wealth, starting with… dishonesty and disingenuousness!

Your choice of words can mean the difference between living a wealthy life and an average one. “Start using the language that highly successful people employ every day,” [self-made millionaire Grant Cardone] says. “Some examples of words to include in your new vocabulary: ‘Great,’ ‘super,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘excellent.’ If someone asks you, ‘How was your weekend?’ Respond: ‘It was a blast.’”

What if your weekend wasn’t a blast, Grant Cardone? Also, I use “great” so often that Gmail autofills it for me and I’m still not rich.

Cardone, as his name implies, used to sell cars. Then he became a CEO, and now he’s a self-help author and motivational speaker with an incredible website. (“Incredible” is another word that highly successful people use, but in this case I’m not using it as a compliment.)

Both CNBC articles stress the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone and away from your steady paycheck. Here’s advice from another self-made millionaire and motivational speaker/author, Steve Siebold:

Siebold, who spent decades studying the world’s wealthiest people, says the rich are typically self-employed, while average people tend to settle for steadier situations.

But self-employed people don’t always get rich right away. (Let’s be honest: they rarely do.) You might need to keep your average, steady paycheck and side hustle your way to wealth.

[…] start something on the side, says [Daymond John], who was living on the tips he made waiting tables at Red Lobster while launching his clothing line that would evolve into a $6 billion brand.

Daymond John is now a motivational speaker/author who also appears on Shark Tank. (His website is even more incredible than Cardone’s. Promise me you’ll click this link and start scrolling.) If you visit his shop, you’ll see that he even offers a limited-edition motivational adult coloring book.

At this point I’m beginning to think that the secret to being wealthy is becoming a motivational speaker/author. I’ve got a book and I’ve spoken at conferences before; where do I go to transfer these skills?

But back to CNBC. According to these two articles, if you want to be rich you should also:

• Wake up early
• Take advantage of the power of compound interest
• Avoid buying things you can’t afford
• Set goals

I don’t know about you, but I already do all of this. I’m guessing a lot of Billfold readers set both goals and their alarms. WHEN WILL THE WEALTH HAPPEN?

Of course, maybe we don’t want to be rich. After all, the Washington Post thinks it will wreck our souls.

Perspective | Being rich wrecks your soul. We used to know that.

When it comes to a broad range of vices, the rich outperform everybody else. They are much more likely than the rest of humanity to shoplift and cheat , for example, and they are more apt to be adulterers and to drink a great deal. They are even more likely to take candy that is meant for children.

And it all started when they lied about their weekends.

How Do We Become Rich, Anyway? was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.