Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Building wealth part 1: my humble beginnings

After working for a while as an attending and making an OK salary, I started realizing that I'm not getting any richer as the days/months/years went by. We were still renting a small 2-bedroom apartment. Yes, we finally got rid of that clunker and bought 2 new mid-priced cars(one American made, and another Japanese). No, we haven't gone on those expensive vacations. And yes, we were maxing out our 401k's. But we had no savings or investments outside of our 401k to speak of.
So the only thing I was noticing was that I was getting older. And I didn't like that. Well, there's nothing you can do about flow of time. But I thought I should be getting richer while getting older and I wasn't. So, where did all that money go? We started monitoring our spending. Turned out, we didn't spend them on anything big. That was it, NOTHING BIG, but everything small. Expensive gifts for our friends' and relatives' birthdays. Nice dining out. Starbucks 3 to 4 times a week. And so on and so forth. So we started thinking every time we were about to swipe them credit cards: do we really need this? and if yes, how log do we envision using it? Would it really improve our quality of life?
Since we started doing that, I stared noticing more money left in our checking account at the end of each month. Still far from the riches, but it was a start.

No comments: