Enjoying Your Money

Sort of a part two to Friday's blog post. I spent part of the weekend talking to friends about saving money and enjoying money. Sometimes the two seem to be worlds apart. My guess from reading these blogs is most folks are hard workers and are dedicated to improving their quality of life. Those of us who do PF blogs are, almost without exception, trying to save money to get out of debt, save for a home, save for a better life. AND almost without exception, very few PF bloggers do post pictures, or describe with happiness and joy a purchase they made when they hit a particular milestone in savings.

I commend everyone who is diligently saving money and striving for a goal, but the more I think about it, the more I feel it is important to:

1) give yourself a treat for reaching a certain milestone-buy that TV, get that new dress, enjoy the fact you saved and earned this particular item if this is what you were saving for. If you reach another money milestone, take yourself out for a Starbucks (if you have given up the $4 latte habit), buy lunch from your favorite deli instead of brown bagging it. For many of us, this is one reason we have new budgets and saving goals. It does not mean to go out and spend all the available credit on the huge 52 plasma flat screen.

and

2) It's OK to NOT meet a milestone in a particular month for what ever reason, don't kick yourself when you are down. For what ever reason, we sometimes don't reach our goals, we just have to objectively look at why we did not and see if we can correct that for the next month. Could be an extenuating circumstance, could be we just could not stick to our budget, could be we need to re-evaluate our budget, it could be any number of things.

I guess we just need to appreciate what we have and pat ourselves on the back when we reach our goals. And continue to strive for better personal finance habits!