Saving money (and your bank account status) is one of the absolute taboos in my circles. I have noticed that almost nobody wants to admit if they have savings, and if they do - they'd never tell you how much is that. We've passed the times when people didn't want to discuss their salaries. Most of my peers have no problems talking about their wages and comparing them with each other. Well, at least those who get them regularly.
The circles I'm in consist of rather precarious creatives - not artists, rather cultural managers, NGO-workers, all sorts of hustlers who finished wrong faculties half a decade ago and now scramble to make it look like they actually found their calling. Anyway, no judgment, I'm no different than them.
So, yesterday one of my friends was curious: did you manage to keep something on the side for the hard times? I nodded. My friend: from how you nod I can see it's more than I did.
I didn't feel like asking any further. It damn feels uncomfortable. The idea of what's sufficient for both of us might be dramatically different. I am used to rather frugal living as a nomad with 9 years of traveling experience, she leads a more settled lifestyle. But then, what do I know about staying somewhere for longer? I'm re-learning that recently.
I was lucky to save some money because of a mix of two very fortunate coincidences. First of all, I haven't paid for a place for more than 3 years now - I've moved around Asia and Europe working for UNDP that covered our house, or for a private university where I also had my lodging fixed. In between these gigs, I lived with my partners, with whom I had an agreement that in exchange for bed I do the cleaning, cooking, and shopping. It worked quite well - it never meant not spending anything, in fact as I didn't have to cover the rent I was very happy to splurge on great groceries. Yet still, I ended up putting aside bigger and bigger pile of unused funds. Of which I never made a lot, anyway.
The second factor is the constant flow of various little projects that always came my way, ever since I started moving around. I can't complain - I had the weirdest and the most beautiful job offers one could ever imagine, some of them paid decently, some of them paid shit, but most of them were very much worthwhile. And so whenever I could, I would always allocate parts of these payments aside.
I'm now sitting on a quite comfortable pile - I won't go hungry for a while if nobody gives me a project anytime soon. And looking at the American statistics, I'm really lucky, as 41% have no savings at all (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/14/how-much-money-the-average-millennial-has-in-savings.html).
But the question was - why don't we talk about our savings? And how many of you managed to put aside enough to feel rather safe? How did you do it? And why?