A story about money

I am weird. I have been told that so many times by so many different people, and some of these people I see on a regular basis, and some of them are my friends. I have grown accustomed to being called weird although to be completely honest, at times I don't exactly know what I am being accused of being weird for.

Recently, I have been ill quite a lot, so much so that I was actually sick of being sick all the time. I have been on antibiotics over antibiotics which caused other issues that I am still dealing with. In my attempt to be healthier, at the encouragement of a friend at the office, I began packing my lunch to work. Actually, that's not true. What she said was actually this:

I am surprised that you buy your lunch everyday. You look like someone who is good with money.

And that's how I discovered that apparently, being good with money and buying lunches are two mutually exclusive things. It is rather hypocritical for you to be good with money and buy your lunch on a daily basis. People who are good with money pack their lunches, okay. That's how you stretch the value of your money, that's how you save money, that's how you become good with money.

I have always wondered why there are more so-called finance bloggers who are blogging about their attempts to get out of debt rather than the ones who share stories about successfully managing their finances. I haven't crunched some numbers yet, however, based on my extremely limited experience with Google on this particular issue, I must say that getting out of debt is attractive. Almost as attractive as the instant gratification of acquiring things on credit.

The attraction of stories of how to get out of debt is similar to that of weight loss. Weight loss is so attractive that it is a multimillion (billion?) dollars industry. Losing weight is almost as attractive as the accumulation of fat and weight - the endless instant gratification of eating junk food - the high fat, high sodium and high sugar, one after each other to mask the lows that they inevitably bring.

And for these watch-me-get-out-debt-bloggers, being good with money equals to saving at every opportunity you can, which really means, not buying coffee, and not buying lunches, not going out for food because you know, preparing your own food is more cost effective. And if you are trying to lose weight, how about you eat less food, because when you buy less food, you can use the money to pay your debt faster. 

My question is this: where are the people who are on the opposite spectrum. Why isn't there more people who openly share their struggles with saving their money, the kind of investment decisions they have to make, the maintenance work that they have to do to stay on top of things, you know, the kind of things that they have to do to be financially successful: how to be successful with money. Is it like some kind of high-mile club whereby those who've cracked the code have been sworn to a code of silence, and the rest of us mere mortals can only guestimate what it takes to be part of the said club.

Or perhaps because when you share stories of financial success, you are viewed as bragging. Plus in general, people don't really want to tell other people how much money they actually own or owe. The code of silence is alive and well - we just don't talk about money altogether.

So, the said friend suggested that (to be more in line with her perception that I am good with money) I pack my lunch to work. And I said, sure, I can do that, just baby steps okay, like we start with one day a week, then the week after that, two days a week, the week after, three, you get the idea. We are now at the end of week one and the number of times I bring my lunch to work is ... five. There are only five working days last week. What can I say, I like to outdo myself like that.

Oh, and set goals that are easy to attain. It makes you feel good and so... accomplished.

If you want to leave comments about this post, you can do so via Twitter, and you need to @drbelles me. You can follow me if you want, you just need to promise to put up with my weird-ness. A display of my almost daily weird-ness is documented on my instagram (no, not really, just a display of the food I eat and other consumeristic endeavours that I pursue). I write about other stuff in my other blog, which you can read if you can't have enough of me.