This Is Not A Personal Finance Advice Column

But I will tell you exactly how bad I am with money so you don’t have to be.

This post is a few things: A cautionary tale, a PSA, a story about money, and an explanation of how I finally attempted to get my shit together in a small but meaningful way. I am not known for being good with money: As I explained last week, I’ve never really “had” money so it did not make sense to me to learn how to be better about handling money. I might as well have bought a children’s toy cash register and learned about savings that way, or played with Monopoly money.

But at the beginning of this year I decided I would finally do what I said I would do for years but never did, which is cancel all my recurring payments that I don’t really use anymore or that are no longer serving me. Due to the privilege of spending a lot of time inside and not seeing other people anymore over the past year, I have plenty of time to do this, so why not? I also promised myself I’d do a bunch of other finance stuff, like merge my 401ks from previous jobs into my current 401k, add more money from each paycheck into my 401k, and learn about investing. I have done literally none of the other stuff but I did spend the past three weeks tracking my spending and learning where my recurring payments are coming from, and then canceling the ones I don’t use anymore.

I promise this image will become relevant to the blog after I’m done with all this introductory throat-clearing. Photo by Mark Bertulfo on Unsplash