Pro Anna

Since starting this weight loss period of my life, I have been getting some comments about my eating habits. Some people are constantly worried that I'm not eating enough, and will always ask about my diet. I don't think I look thin for them to be concerned, but I guess it is touching that these people care about me. In case you are wondering, no, I'm not on some crazy no-eating diet. I'm rarely hungry, pretty much the only time I get hungry is shortly before lunch and shortly before dinner, which I think is healthy. I have read that anorexic people enjoy controlling how much they put into their bodies because it is a part of their life that they do have control over. So when everything is falling into a burning heap, at least they have control over their body weight.

Instead of controlling my weight, I think my fallback treatment is controlling my finances. It sounds silly, but I really enjoy looking at how much interest I've earned from doing almost nothing. I've been thinking about getting into the investment game for a while now, but I'm too risk averse to be able to bring myself to do it. Plus, if we are looking at buying a house soon after getting married, we probably need more liquid assets anyway.

I recently picked up You Need A Budget at the last steam sale, and have spent the past month itemizing all of our spending and making a budget. I enjoy keeping track of where all of my money is going, and looking at all the graphs that breakdown the spending categories, but sometimes I feel as though it's painful spending money. Which is crazy, because it's not like we are struggling with money at the moment (although every wedding expense is eating away at my heart).

I came across this reddit post by someone who describes exactly how I feel:

http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/2thwad/money_is_for_saving_not_for_using_saving_to_the/

I think about dying before I can enjoy the money and it scares me....

To put it into a dorky perspective... When I play RPGs, I stockpile hundreds of potions until the last battle, and I still hesitate to use them. I really only needed 5, and it all kind of feels like a waste.

I'm exactly the same when it comes to MMOs. When playing Final Fantasy X, I made it most of the way through the game without using any of the consumable items you find in the game (with the exception of a couple of grenades the tutorial makes you use when Rikku joins your team). I just felt like I had to save them for when I really, really needed them. When I finally started to hit the inventory cap for some of the items, you'd think I'd start using them more often, but nope, all I did was sell them for money. Money which is mainly used for buying consumable items! I did end the game being ridiculously rich, but there were some parts of the game where I died over and over, and had to grind levels until my party was strong enough to make it through.

I don't know if this is a good behaviour to have. Some of the comments point at it being a marker of low self-worth, as the OP says, he's happy to spend all kinds of money on gifts, he just can't bring himself to spend money on himself. Likewise, I am perfectly happy to spend all of my money on things that my family or MrMan5.5 want - I even set up an emergency fund for my sister, in case she can't get in contact with my parents and desperately needs money (though it mostly goes towards her Steam game purchases... runs in the family). I was really hesitant to spend $50 on a game that I really wanted to play.

It's really hard for me to justify spending money on certain frivolous things, especially when there are so many other things that the money needs to go towards. It does stress me out a bit, as sometimes I feel like I am spending so much of my life going to work, just to earn money to keep things running smoothly so that I can keep going to work. Intern Daniel has a conspiracy theory that mortgages are things invented by the government to make sure that we keep working until we're old. Usually when I start feeling down about saving money, I try to think about the bigger picture, and how I would like to buy a house for my parents. Sometimes I feel a bit stingy though, although I mostly feel this when I go out to eat with friends and they're all ordering drinks and I'm just happy with my water. But the water thing is just me trying to keep my sugar intake down, rather than my desire to save money. So I am a penny-pincher, but not as bad as I seem!

Having YNAB has made me feel a lot better about where my money is going, and after things relax a little after the wedding and the honeymoon, I think I'll start assigning a bit more money to myself and the things I want to do. It'll make it a lot easier to focus on the larger goal, and I won't feel so compelled to beat myself up over every dollar spent. Even though each hotel booking is another huge chunk out of our savings account, I am looking forward to being able to relax in Europe for six and a half weeks. We're nearing the final sprint - 100 days to go!