Instead of it being a decision of trying to save an increasing percent of $1200 or doubling to $2400, it's me trying to save an increasing percent of my current $1200 so that extra $1200 will go even farther later.
So let's look at the comment I replied to. He ignored your advice/approach and instead did things my way: as a result he moved from $30K salary to over $100K in five years.
That doesn't happen without considerable investment of time and energy.
Based on the fact that you are religiously inputting every transaction at point of sale, into a mobile app, and based on your being a HN reader, I will go ahead and make the prediction that you are able to earn within the top 10% of wage-earners in your city. My prediction is that instead of doing so, you are working equally hard to earn less than 50% of that amount. Go ahead and look up statistics and get back to me about whether I'm correct.
In other words, I am actively predicting that you are close to or even below the medium earner in your city, rather than in the top 10% as you have the ability to do so.
You don't have to tell me what city you are living in or what your earnings are, but I would appreciate if you told me whether I was correct.
By the way I can't visit your site, because your SSL cert is out of date and chrome won't let me visit it.
In the time you spent saving or stretching your rent, or inputing your groceries at the point of sale, you could have fixed that and been hired by someone who instead chose to pass on you since you can't even run your own web server.
It's a zero-sum game: either you are spending 30 seconds to a minute inputing expenses into your mobile app and using 'shoe leather' to walk around from store to store and evaluate your options so that you can shave a few pennies, or you are getting home a few minutes earlier and fixing your SSL cert and sending out another five resumes. It's one or the other.
I'd love to know whether my prediction about your wage is correct.
>The certificate expired on Tuesday, June 07, 2016 1:59 AM. The current time is Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:50 PM.
That said, I would gain as much time by parking closer to the entrance of the store as I would by not putting in transactions. It really is negligible time spent at this point. The largest time sink is the one night/month to reconcile all accounts and allocate for next month. The better I am at putting in my transactions at point of sale, the quicker that process goes too! In theory I still have 29 days a month to send out resumes.
Edit: Within the top 10% by household income according to http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...
You might still increase your income more than the time you spend saving money, though :) I was able to read your resume after adding an exception in Firefox, but I don't think employers would do that. It's a question of mentality, and I consider likely that you could increase your wage if you wanted to. But of course only you know that - for all I know you're exceptionally well-paid and kind of lucky to have scored your current wage at all. In my experience this is not commonly combined with tracking every expense.
But what do I know? John D. Rockefeller wrote every expense from when he was a teen through a billionaire. So who knows.
Possible! It's more of a pesky human thing that I track my money anymore, having gone through a period where I was tiptoeing overdrawing my bank account every day. I feel much more comfortable (less stressed) about making moderate to large purchases knowing that every cent is already accounted for and previously allotted to those purchases.
As for my place in the wage distribution it is a freak circumstance of well paying job and low COL area. Not that I'm dissatisfied with the area (yet..), but it also makes it hard to justify moving for a 2x salary when housing will be 3-4x.
- I agree with what I think your main statement is, and will put it into an alternative argument, so others here can understand.
There is a statement "a penny saved is a penny earned." This is true. But if you're spending a penny the most you can save is a penny: if you're trying to earn more, you can earn a penny, nickel, dime, quarter, or dollar. The most you can move up in lifestyle by living "frugally" is whatever you're saving. But if you put that same effort into earning more you can have a better quality of life more easily.
To put it into concrete terms: if you have someone who nets $1200 per month and are living within the budget that gives you, then the most that they can possibly "save" is up to $1200 per month. It is mathematically impossible to shave more than that off of your current spending, because by definition there is no more than that. So the theoretical maximum that you can possibly 'save' or reduce your spending by $1200/month. Try to reduce your rent, your food, your transportation, whatever, to fit within your $7/hour budget and you will spend a lot of time with very little to show for it, because the most that you can possibly show for it is... $7/hour. That's a theoretical ceiling on savings.
But by focusing on increasing your earnings, there is no wall. So through all of the work in the world, you have a theoretical maximum that you could save of 1200/month - however it's fair to say that by moving to $2400/month everything in your old lifestyle was "free", and you can now buy new things, or a few better things. It's the same as if you saved 100% of all of your former costs, without doing any shopping around or anything else to actively save - it's as if those costs magically dropped to $0 - you can buy them all, and still have $1200 left. And all by focusing on your earnings and ignoring all that savings stuff.
So what's easier, shopping around until you've shaved some percentage of your $1200 spending -- or moving from $1200 to $2400 in net wages?
The latter is considerably easier than the former. I would say it's not possible to do the former, you can just approach it. Through hard work "saving" you could shave off let's say 40% or even 50% -- it's still easier to move up in wages by the same amount instead.
EDIT: I got downvoted. Are people getting what I'm saying? Someone making $1200 (which is 14.4K/year) can never save more than 1200, even if they are so good at it that they're able to reduce their spending by 80%. The most that they can save even in theory is $1200. But they could have the same net effect by working on increasing their wage. There is no ceiling on the latter. It's far (far!!!) easier to move from $1200 to $2400 in earnings, than trying to save 80% off of your spend @ $1200. And even though it's easier, it has a bigger effect.
Let's put this into concrete terms: if you're a barrista making $10/hour in Silicon Valley, you are having a hard time making ends meet. You can try to absolutely cut out all of your costs, rent, transportation, food, etc, and you will still have a hard time. Or you can put the same effort into learning to design, putting a small portfolio together, and trying to get hired as a designer. While completely ignoring trying to save on those costs, and instead just, say, deferring some of your demand. It's easier to make money than to save money, other than possibly the easiest optimizations. (such as making sure that you're not drastically overpaying for anything by 3x or 5x). And it has a bigger impact on your life.