The Financial Diet Reminds Us That Being an Adult Is Expensive

I’ve been watching Chelsea Fagan’s new webseries The Financial Diet — an outpost of her larger website, also called The Financial Diet — and I really liked her latest episode, “The Unexpected Expenses of Adulthood.”

Fagan and her co-host, Lauren Ver Hage, list a bunch of expenses that all of us adults should be saving for in advance, including:

— Professional-level clothing and grooming

— Attending your friends’ weddings

— Holiday travel, gifts, and hosting responsibilities

— Accidentally breaking your friends’ stuff

— Accidentally breaking your own stuff

This is in addition to the 5 percent of each paycheck that Fagan and Ver Hage suggest should be going into your retirement fund (which, honestly, I should add to my sub-savings accounts — although I’d rather wait until my debt is paid off and then put 10 percent of each paycheck into retirement), as well as the good old emergency fund, which Fagan advises you to build up first:

“You get to do nothing else, in terms of fun spending, until you have at least three months, at the bare minimum, of expenses in your savings account.”

Wow. Okay. I did not do that. I am still, actively, not doing that. My savings account currently contains $2,600.29, and three months of $1,800 basic living expenses equals $5,400. So am I not supposed to host parties or do holiday travel or buy new clothes or anything else until I get that $5,400?

Since I have roughly $700 in non-spoken-for money every month, I could in theory continue to put 10 percent of my income (approximately $500) into savings every month plus the extra $700, and I’d hit $5,400 in three months. But there’s no way I’m skipping the trip to visit family over the holidays, and I’m not skipping my vacation in February, and I’m not even skipping the $5 it’ll cost to make a fancy dessert for Thanksgiving. I will do the fun spending and trust that it will be okay!

(It’s a bit like the retirement conundrum from yesterday: I “don’t have enough” saved for retirement, but there’s “not much I can do about that now,” so I’m going to “just assume that everything will work out.”)

Fagan and Ver Hage do acknowledge that most of our salaries probably won’t cover all of this saving and spending that we need to be doing as adults — which means adding side hustles to increase our income.

Which I totally agree with, and which I’m also not doing myself, because I am currently putting in 12-hour days doing my actual hustle. But sure, if your income isn’t cutting it, and your employer doesn’t have a rule against it, side hustle!

At the end of this video, all I could think was wow, being an adult sounds really hard. It’s only a few minutes long, so watch it yourself and let us know what you think.

(Want to learn more about Chelsea Fagan? The Billfold interviewed her earlier this year.)

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