Rest and Rejuvenation Day 18: Finances and Budgeting

I am going to be very honest and admit that I haven’t focused all that much on my finances in 2020. Aside from losing my job, I also did not qualify for unemployment and that just left me incredibly stressed. I also had to move all of my things from China to the United States in the middle of a pandemic…when I was not living in China. All of that added so much stress that I kind of let my finances take a backseat. I want to be transparent and admit that my finances are all right going into 2021 because I was able to get a job and that alleviated some of the stress I had about money. However, I definitely need to get back on track when it comes to my finances and I decided to set two simple goals for myself for 2021. 

This is genuinely one of the hardest goals I have set my for myself this year because saving is hard. Again, for transparency I want to admit that I don’t pay rent at the moment but come 2021 I will be needing to pay my parents money for staying in the house. I’m lucky enough that I don’t have to pay as much as many people around the US do for rent but this is going to make saving extremely hard. Still, this is a goal for me. I won’t share the end goal amount that I have for 2021 but I am hoping to create a budget that I can stick to that will really make me consider where my money is going. 2020 left my family with many questions and money was one of the most stressful aspects of it. I hope to begin law school in 2022 so I am hoping to have some cushion for when I have to move to New York City. 

This is the easier of the two goals because I am only working towards paying off credit card debt. My student loans are a completely different conversation so I won’t talk about those for privacy reasons. As I have a job now and I have money coming in regularly, I am actually able to keep my credit card usage under a certain amount which actually makes this a lot easier to achieve. I am hoping that this will allow my credit score to go up. Again, this is not a number that I will be sharing publicly but I think that with good money management I can reach it. I hope going into 2022 that I have a good credit score. 

After I finish writing my two goals, I realize that they overlapped quite a while so that was unintentional. However, I still like the two goals I set for myself. They are specific enough that I will not get bogged down with trying to figure out what is what but they are vague up that I will not stress myself out all too much and attempt to reach them. I do have specific numerical values for both of the goals but I am not comfortable sharing that publicly. I will say that the goals are not astronomically high and are achievable.