I have most bills automated, everything that can go on a credit card does. I manually pay down the cards unless there’s a good reason not to, like currently I’m getting ~1% interest on one of them so it can carry a balance for a few months. In the past any excess cash would get moved into a brokerage account about once a month but that’s on hold for now because there’s been a lot of big expenses recently and I need to hopefully pile up more cash for another big expense later in the year. I don’t actually track anything very closely beyond looking at the accounts regularly and doing some rough math. I round things as conservatively as possible when doing the rough math so there’s always some leeway built in to my assumptions that err on the side of me spending more than I probably will.
I follow an unconventional method that I came up with myself: any time I spend money on anything “unnecessary” (so, excluding things like rent, groceries, etc), I put an equal amount into my savings account.
Pros include: This method alleviates my guilt of spending money on myself. It scales, so the more money I make, the more I tend to save. It’s flexible enough that even during the times where I can’t afford to save, I can still stick to it.
The main “planning” I did was related to my job. I saved a few months of expenses in a savings account. Enough so if I lost my job I’d be able to survive for at least a few months. That removed a ton of stress from the day to day of work since I knew I could always step back if I really had to and if I lost my job I wouldn’t starve.
Essentially I “planned” enough to give me the freedom to live in the moment with less worry.
Reoccurring nightmares are not you. They are someone else, like you, but a different you, in a different universe/timeline (think Jet Li in The One).
For some reason, our brains sometimes connect with these others while we sleep. Maybe it has something to do with a perfect alignment of brain waves or something, but this is also why time is often so screwy in dreams, or the facts of the dream change. You are like an old analog radio tuning in a faraway station while driving through the mountains. Sometimes the signal is strong, sometimes it is barely there, and sometimes you cross over a hill and suddenly you are listening to something completely different.
The next time you wake from a particular nightmare, stop and think about what you can do to help your other self. Make sure you take the physics of their reality into account… they are somehow falling to their deaths because they jumped too high? Then they must have the strength or low gravity needed to make that happen. So maybe it is only scary because you are applying your physics, but in their world they just need to brace for landing, or prepare to tuck and roll… Did they get attacked by a nightmare creature? Well you just need to make sure that when you reconnect with them the next time, you reconnect earlier in the timeline, and firmly hold the idea they need to show up ready to fuck that creature up. Don’t know how to fuck up a 30ft, fire breathing, strap on dildo wearing, pigeon? You don’t need to. They live in that reality, I’m sure they know how to deal with it, they just need to know to be prepared. And even if they don’t know, one of the other yous will. It’s a pest that other other you deals with daily on the way to work. You just need to connect with one of them first, get the information, and then reconnect with the other you… odds are that the solution is a fire extinguisher, an even bigger strap on, and a bag of bird seed, and boom, you’ve turned their hell into a way to shorten their daily commute by a factor of ten (once they get a saddle for it of course, safety first).
Once you have your plan, you go back in with the intent to purposely reconnect to the nightmare and give the other you the tools they need fix their situation. And don’t forget, time is not linear between universes. Your nightmare is reoccurring because you repeatedly keep reconnecting to this particular moment. So that also means, that with a little effort, you should be able to connect earlier in the timeline too.
Remember, it’s not you, but you can help. You have all the time in the world to think it through and formulate a plan. And you can keep trying until you get it right.
Is this referring to lucid dreaming or are you more suggesting some kind of mental rehearsal to prime yourself to hopefully reflexively respond next time you’re in a similar dream-predicament?
Not exactly, this is about changing your entire perspective on how you view dreams, how you respond to them, and how you feel about what happens to the characters within them.
You are not a helpless victim of your dreams. You are an unintentional 3rd party witness, much like watching someone else play a video game. You may be experiencing the same visuals and sounds as the user, but you are not actually at the controls. You don’t have to feel guilty or helpless, it’s not your game. But much like watching someone else play, you can make suggestions, or possibly even take the controls for a moment. You have time to look up tips and watch other play-throughs.
Also, you don’t have to fear going back to sleep, especially if it is a recurring dream. In fact, you can be excited to have the dream again, because this time you have a plan.
I started with zero-based budgeting via YNAB ages ago when ynab was a local-only app. Over time though I’ve adjusted and focus on tracking my expenses rather than budgeting. I’ve found that for me, budgeting is hard to stick to because I can never predict well enough. Ynab helped back when I used it but even then I always had a “rollover” fund I had to steal from almost arbitrarily to make things balanced.
I do keep a rough spreadsheet budget of my fixed expenses though (rent, internet, phone, electricity, etc) that I use to understand how much of my money is “locked-in” and what is discretionary.
For tracking, I have a spreadsheet I input all my expenses into every month or two that I use to see how Ive been spending my money, and I use that to decide if I’m happy with where I am.
Soak dried Porcini or Shiitake mushroom in a bowl of warm water for about 20 min (can boil the mushrooms if fresh). The mushrooms then can be used as an ingredient to a variety of recipes but more importantly, the bowl of water is now an umami bomb, and can be used as a broth or seasoning to add a ton of flavor to a bunch of dishes (pasta sauce, soup, stir-fry…)
Porcini in particular has an earthly, nutty taste and can be used to create complex sauces with a “beefy” taste.
I don’t really budget, I live alone, and make enough money to support myself and live a decent life.
But I do have a few rules:
I will never set up any kind of subscription, be it media (HBO, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal), apps (Flightradar24, Vesselfinder), games (Geoguessr). What I will do is buy prepaid cards with credit for those services, and activate them for a set period of time, but I will never buy into a recurring charge for a service, I have seen too many people ruining their economy with subscriptions being a big contributer.
I seldom give into impulse buying expensive stuff, but if I have the money and can afford it I am not against buying quallity even if it more expensive at first.
I don’t accept a seller or sales system stressing me out to buy as fast as possible, I can and have just walked away when I felt uncomfortable with how fast the sale if being pushed, I want to have time to think about if this thing is worth it for that price and if I need it now before I buy it.
You may want to see if your bank will let you create disposable cards. I have two credit cards where I can create temporary or reloadable cards at no charge for transactions.
So if I wanted to trial something, I would create a card with $1 on it. The trial starts and does the test transaction. I forget to cancel before the trial is over, but the card has no money so it automatically cancels.
If I wanted a subscription to HBO, I could create an HBO card and load the amount for it every month. When I cancel, I don’t have to worry that they’ll try to keep charging me because I just don’t add anything else to the card. It also makes me think about whether I’m using a service every month.
It saved me a few hundred bucks not terribly long ago. I tried a clothing subscription box that was absolutely terrible. So I contacted their customer service to cancel because they don’t have a real way to do it on their site. They didn’t get back to me in time and attempted to charge my card for another box. Luckily it was on the temp card and there was no cash on it so I just got a rejected charge on my card.
Yep, it was an old system, I think it was flash based, which makes it understandable that they shut it off, but not that they didn’t replace it with an updated system.
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