Friendship is priceless, and also $160 a month.
Between last month when none of my friends were back/out of quarantine and this month when most of them are out, my leisure/eating out spending more than doubled. That only sounds impressive until you realize eating out in China is cheap and my ideal weekend involves me being mostly stationary in the vicinity of my bed.
Side note: sorry for the late post, the newest Excel update disabled Excel on my laptop so I couldn’t open my beloved spreadsheets. It’s not fixed, I just finally gave up and used my work computer to open the files I needed instead.
Spendings Report: $1349
The highest spending category: Education
I’ve started taking Mandarin lessons and even though it stings my savings rate a bit I’m very much enjoying re-learning my mother tongue. It is my hope by the time spring starts I can read a book meant for a 5 year old. For those more curious, I’m working through the HSK4 textbook but probably won’t bother taking the test until HSK5, likely 2 years from now.
The second highest spending: Clothing
I bought 4 new pairs of work pants this month, mostly meant for winter wear. At heart, I’m an incredibly lazy person and having 4 more pairs just means I now have 5 total outfits I can rotate through without much thought. Every minute I shave off in the mornings means another minute I can stay asleep.
Next month I would like to get a pair or two of new work shoes.
Net Worth Update: $122,385
My goal is to reach $150k by the end of this school year in July. I’ve overshot my last two savings goals so let’s see how it goes. A longer-term goal is to reach $200k by the time I exit China and go back to Canada, hopefully also bringing with me a plan of wtf to do once I’m there. Have you ever changed careers? How did it go? What did you change from and into?
I really want to take 3-4 months off and just travel around the world meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in a while. I keep on thinking about it but also thinking that if I change careers I would rather have a large safety net in place and thus can’t spend that money taking basically an extended vacation. Then I think about all the advice regarding tomorrow is not guaranteed and we should also live while we can. It’s driving me in circles and I dislike that there’s no obvious right answer. Why can’t life also come with a syllabus and rubric?
If you have advice for a moderately-lost 27yr old, please tell me.
It’s okay to be lost as long as you’re moving forward 🙂
I’m so glad to see you’re doing well for yourself. The reality is, you’re doing better than most back home. To be honest, you probably don’t need $200k in safety net because as long as you’ll be working, you’ll continue to earn money.
Thank you for the vote of confidence! The fear is definitely more psychological than real, I just got used to this career and now I’m thinking of changing again haha…