Money or Death?
I believe that money brings us happiness. Yes, it’s not the only factor to be happy, but we ALWAYS need money to live.
On December 23, 2020, I turned 21. This makes me even more afraid of the future, given that no one knows for sure what will happen next. One of my biggest fears is financial problems. Making money is not that easy, even until right now, I believe that all country’s economy experiencing a decline due to this Corona pandemic.
My fear of money sometimes comes from doubting my future-readiness. Sometimes I doubt myself and keep asking, “Can I make money just like other people outside there?” or “Can I buy a house or a car at a certain age?” or “Can I get a good salary based on the skills that I have?”, and many more. All of those thoughts always repeating in my head.
If you read this and feel you have the same experience as me. Congrats! It’s time for us to make a change. Instead of overthinking, let’s do something. I will write some advice that many people have told me about managing money since it’s not that easy when dealing with that. So it’s for the reminder for me and you.
1.Balancing between Needs and Wants
I believe that all of us have already heard that statement 95647390 times, but the fact is that we still make an excuse such as, “Oh, I need this in my life! It’s very useful! I swear this is not wasting money”. The last time, I opened TikTok, there were lots of videos that many people created showing them buying kinds of stuff that I thought it wasn’t that necessary. One of the examples was this cute TV shaped tissue holder. This can be used as a standing tissue box. Moreover, it also can be used as a phone holder to support your smartphone.
Now, the question is, do you really don’t have a tissue holder in your house before you buy that? I believe that most people buy this is only for a great collectible idea to decorate their home desk or office instead of they REALLY need it.
It doesn’t mean that we cannot buy what we want, but we need to focus on what we need first rather than what we want. If we want to have a long life, this is the point of balancing it, so that when something unexpectedly urgent happens and we NEED to spend our money on that, we are READY.
2.Don’t register a credit card!
Actually, I got this advice from my mom. She said to me, “Don’t be tempted to make a credit card just because you can buy the stuffs that you want right now. (And yes, until now, my family doesn’t have credit cards at all). Because in the end, you need to pay, and sadly part, you need to pay extra money for the bank’s interest. Moreover, it’s the era where there are many applications that activated ‘Buy first, pay later’, and one of them is Shopee. I think most people have already familiar with Shopeepay Later and how it’s used. Credit card or pay later, in most cases, makes you want to buy more and more until you don’t realize how much you have spent.
Note: But if it’s urgent and important to make it, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as it helps you to overcome the problems that you are facing.
3.Investing something
It’s true that stocks are a great tool to invest in, and it’s profitable compared to others. But we must know that higher return means higher risk. Definitely, for beginners, don’t dare to play stocks! Meanwhile, you can’t make that excuse for making you for deciding not to invest at all. To be honest, I only know about stocks, so my best investing tool so far is by purchasing gold.
The price movement of gold every year on average always increases. Even if it goes down, it won’t drop. It’s better to buy your money for gold than to deposit it in a bank. Look at the long term, it must be more fortunate!
