My Money OCD
~ Saturday, July 20, 2024 Blog Post ~
It may be funny, but I admit I’m afflicted with money obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD. With this money paranoia, I’m an obsessive saver and investor. I must say I’m a super-strict budgeter and ensure that all my financial decisions and actions work to my financial advantage. In my daily life, I perform everything that can actually help me save money.
I honestly worry a lot about my future, especially my financial future and my retirement. I’m a clean slate without commitments and restrictions and have opted not to marry and have children. Hence, I don’t have the usual family financial responsibilities most adults have. Yet, I’m still afraid to become bankrupt and live hand-to-mouth — a dread that people who know me quite well may find ridiculous for me to be bothered about.
But I just have this justified fear for my financial future, especially in this world where fortunes can be gained and lost fast if a person is naive and not careful. Thus, it is certainly wise to be thrifty, pennywise, and not pound-foolish.
9 Tell-Tale Signs I Have Money Paranoia
As a single, clean slate person, my saving and investing goals have always been to achieve financial security for myself, capital preservation, and maintain my present comfortable lifestyle until my retirement years. I have set my goals clearly and concentrate on them as I work on building my financial life. I’m concerned about my long-term financial security.
Playwright and screenwriter Tennessee Williams in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” play wisely put it, “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it. You’ve got to be old with money because to be old without it is just too awful, you’ve got to be one or the other, either young or with money, you can’t be old and without it. That’s the truth.”
I enumerated the nine indicators that I have money OCD, and they are the following:
1. Paying myself first all the time
Since I want to secure my financial future and retirement, I make sure the money from my paychecks proceeds to my financial goals first. I regularly contribute to my retirement account and other long-term savings projects and investing accounts throughout my working years. I always make it a point to have yearly savings projects and steadily contribute to and monitor the progress of that fund toward its completion.
2. Terrified to spend a lot
Since I considerably worry about my retirement and my financial future, I make sure things always work for my financial benefit. I ensure I stay on top of my financial health by taking the time to track my spending. Moreover, I typically come up with a reasonable budgeting plan and decide on amounts I can afford to spend monthly. Putting the correct systems for my financial situation in place lets me get to the destination I want to be, which I want to highlight is getting a massive pay-off later in my life or during my retirement years.
3. Considers compounding interest as a friend
Cash is a fantastic asset to hold during crisis times. Moreover, it is ideal for short-term objectives like keeping money safe for a house downpayment that will be made within a couple of years.
Nevertheless, having cash is not the only thing that would comfortably carry me through my twilight years, even if it is extremely significant to build up my emergency fund. It is also not a long-term investing strategy and I cannot compound holding mostly or only cash.
“Compounding wealth” is the ultimate lazy investing secret, per Alexander Lowry. He is a professor and director of the Master of Science program in Financial Analysis at Gordon College. Indeed, this financial golden nugget, which renowned physicist Albert Einstein described as the world’s “eighth wonder,” is the safe and sure road that anybody can fortunately perform, according to Professor Lowry.
He added that I need time to compound my wealth successfully for compounding only works through time. I agree with his insights. Thus, I always make it a point to invest some of my savings and reinvest the dividends.
Compounding interest works to my financial advantage with myself investing my money and then leaving it alone or keeping a laissez-faire attitude while allowing years of interest-building to work in my favor. I don’t sell off my assets at the initial sign of a market dip.
4. Being a hoarder
As a frugal penny-pincher, I don’t just get rid of white elephants in my house. After all, it is always on my mind that someday I might need that particular item and that I don’t want to buy it. Therefore, I don’t just throw things away as I detest buying and spending often.
5. Regularly keeps track of expenses
I usually spend my money on food and utility bills payment. I have traveled abroad many times for vacation and sightseeing, and I make sure I get my money’s value every time I’m overseas.
Additionally, I usually copy the receipts for the items I buy in my notebook and determine whether I spent my hard-earned money properly on that particular day or otherwise. If not, I’ll avoid that specific expense. Nonetheless, I usually spend my money in ways I feel satisfied after.
6. Eschews family gatherings
I have put an end to attending family gatherings, particularly those that require me to spend money on hypocritical family members. I have relatives who are not gainfully employed, ugly, old, unhealthy, and miserable who bully and target family members who are the opposite. With their immense insecurities and envy, they tend to be condescending and are into virtue signaling most of the time. These relatives I am done with like to engage in envy attacks and spew backhanded insults to ruffle the feathers of kind and polite family members who are in the catbird seat and seemingly will not fight back. As bullies, they gaslight a lot and do their very best to make their targets question themselves and feel as insecure as they are.
Indeed, bullying starts in the family and this terrible experience has led me to cut off those people-pleasing and two-faced white knight manipulators seething with extreme envy. I ghosted them without second thoughts as if I never knew them at all. After all, they absolutely have no place in my quiet and prosperous life, have no prerogative to say put-downs to me while we hardly spend time with one another, and above all, have no right to benefit from my hard-earned money !
Those unscrupulous and envious relatives actually have nothing in common with me. Our values, lifestyles, interests, and direction are different from one another. Thus, considering our disparities and tendency to clash, it is best to deliberately avoid seeing these blood relations and have nothing to do with them. It is certainly pointless spending time with these people when I’m actually headed to more prosperity while they are off to suffer their worst karma for being narcissistic losers.
I promised myself that I will never ever give those bad relatives the time of day again. I will never ever purchase birthday cakes for them again, greet them during Mother’s Day, their birthday, Christmas, New Year, and so on. These mean and severely jealous relatives are, indeed, both a waste of my precious time and money. After all, they will never help boost my bank account balances nor provide me with useful insights on how to improve my financial life more, since looking at their miserable lives, their financial lives are a disaster and they are not — and most likely will never ever become — financially smart at all. Hence, they are best ghosted and forgotten. I’m glad I’m done with those relatives and have moved on from my mistake of reconnecting with them a few years ago.
7. Finds ecstasy in saving loose change or pennies
With my frugality disease, I feel enormous gladness collecting loose coins and adding them to my savings deposits in the bank. In my case, this happiness is the same as that positive emotion I feel when my income and allowances increase. Saving pennies here and there is worth the same as my invaluable time. As a financially savvy person with intense passion for finance and financial security, I find saving loose coins as important and exciting as my moments tallying them in my journal and taking the time to go to my bank to deposit them together with the paper bills.
I know I’m funny, yet, my opinion as a super-saver is these pennies have value similar to the banknotes. I cannot achieve my million-dollar savings and investment projects without these small amounts of money in my savings account. I also realized these coins when deposited in the bank become a part of the financial institution’s annual revenue. The bank certainly cannot reach trillions of dollars in earnings yearly without those loose pennies which may seem a pittance but collectively, they are worth so much.
8. Avoids credit card interest
I don’t want to be responsible for one cent of interest which I will accrue if I pay my credit card bills late. Interest, finance charges, and late-payment fees are avoidable and unnecessary waste of money. Hence, I NEVER settle my credit card debts late. I usually pay them a month early. In this manner, I relish financial peace of mind which is what I am after.
9. Chooses to spend time discovering more about growing investments and savings further
People can be time-wasters and I don’t have the patience for them. Therefore, at this point, I carefully assess activities and people in my life prior to engaging in or with them. After all, I hate wasting my precious time on anything trivial. I would rather spend my time painstakingly reading and researching about how I can further set myself up to succeed financially.
I choose to spend more time thinking about my hard-earned money, saving it, and growing my wealth which I think I absolutely have to, considering my tremendous worry about my financial future.
As for my hobbies, I usually read personal finance articles and e-books. I also enjoy watching, listening to, and participating in webinars conducted by certified financial coaches and financial educators. I enrich myself more with financial virtues and ideas on how I can further build up my savings, investments, retirement contributions, and so forth. I opt to focus on my retirement account, personal savings, and vacation funds.
As a money-paranoid person or having that obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to my finances, I believe I made the right decision. It’s clear that if I stayed nonchalant about my finances and never cared about stashing and investing my hard-earned money in my entire life, my financial future would definitely be doomed. Neglect and ignorance when it comes to money is never a virtue and there is certainly no nobility in poverty. Thus, I don’t regret having money OCD at all.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Williams
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8131492-you-can-be-young-without-money-but-you-can-t-be
https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/health/people-worry-more-about-money-than-health/
https://www.moneyinstructor.com/doc/moneyparanoia.asp
https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/penny-wise-pound-foolish
