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I need to figure out how I feel about money.

Today I had a fun adventure where I had to save every penny possible to get from the San Francisco Airport (SFO) to my cheap hotel in Mountain View. I wanted to do it in under 10 dollars, with the hotel running me about $100.00 I thought. I succeeded for the most part, but there were some mistakes that I felt in the future I could improve.

So, this was my adventure. The first part was pretty plain and simple, I left SFO through BART ($4.00) to Millbrae, and then took Caltrain ($4.25) to the Mountain View stop. Upon arrival, I walked around 25 minutes to the hotel I had previously looked up. It turns out it was sold out when I got there, which shoved me a bit out of my comfort zone, walking with my luggage at midnight around Mountain View. It scared me a little, and that was good, it's always good to get scared, and learn new experiences. From there I walked maybe a minute next door to a Comfort Inn, which happened to also be sold out. The experience however, was completely different. The guy at the Comfort Inn was concerned, and called a few places to help me find a place to stay, and called a cab driver for me as well. This was awesome. I felt a little better, and made it to my hotel where I am writing this now. The cab ride was $14.70,  which pushed me over my 10 dollar limit, but the Comfort Inn in Palo Alto was only $80.00, so I was ok. Now, as I was walking around running all these numbers through my head, I went into deep thought about money, and whether I should care.

Everyone has a different approach on money. Some people would have taken a cab straight from the airport to a decent hotel, spent $80.00 on the cab and $140 on the place. I've done this before, in fact, I usually do this because its a lot less stress for me and saves me time. However, why do I give a fuck? There's two ways of looking at this. If you have the money, stop worrying about the future and go ahead and spend it, if you need money in the future, you'll figure it out. The other is, why do you stress so much over pointless things? If you can't find a hotel in one place, there will surely be one elsewhere (there were like 20 hotels when I took the cab ride). Chill out. I usually like to go for an in between, where I chill out and don't care about the money. However, I think not caring about spending money is a stupid way of thinking about it because it gets me to unnecessarily spend money on things of no value. Nice hotels, destressed lives, it's not as rewarding as traveling somewhere, or certain experiences. I realized that I should be spending money on life lessons, on things that will change the way I see the world and help me discover the most inspiring things in this earth. This is what I want. So, with that in mind, I will proceed to live a humbler life, which will go as follows:

  • I will look at everything I currently pay for and determine whether I really need it. Something tells me I most likely will not need many of my things.
  • I will save a large percentage of my income, so that I can only spend a certain amount on a per week basis. This way, I will be able to successfully monitor the amount of money I use correctly.
I hope to accomplish these things this summer, and live a more humble life :).

Take care,
Daniel.

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