Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Adulting as a 30 year old
When did you feel like an adult?
Was it when you moved out of your parental home? Moved to another city? Another country? Bought your first home? Turned 25? Was it when you started earning and made financial decisions? Or when you first visited the doctor by yourself and tried explaining your symptoms?
Does anyone ever figure out adulthood or are we just making it up as we go along?
As a 30-year-old professional, who has lived independently in multiple cities and countries, I find myself on the lower end of the adulthood spectrum — especially when it comes to financial literacy.
I liked to think I was good with money. At least saving it.
But I’ve learned — to my surprise — that “saving” is more than just setting aside some of my paycheck, locked and forgotten. Saving doesn’t mean I need to keep my expenses in check, refrain from frivolous shopping, and stop Amazon-ing as a coping mechanism.
Saving means my money needs to be divided into at least three portions: some for when I retire, some for my health, and some for the emergencies that life may throw at me.
And as I understand it, the most important part: my money should grow by itself. There’s no point just letting your cash rot in a savings account. It’s supposed to undergo mitosis and multiply.
If you’re exasperated because you’ve figured this out quite earlier in life, I apologize. I’m just a late bloomer.
You might just want to ask me for my laptop and say with a pinched expression, “Here, let me do it.” But it’s okay, some things just take time.
Why I’m only now starting my financial journey
Multiple reasons—that people around me call excuses, but I’m OK coasting through life not knowing what “options trading” means—sorting out finances is never-ending.
First: It’s not just a monthly thing; there’s always something new every step of the way! I had to research and educate myself about all the options available on how to apportion my money and make the right decisions.
It drained my brain. It felt like lifting a mountain to wade through the numbers, mathematicize more than I like to, and move those digits around.
Second: Financial decisions are scary to make. Plus, there’s always someone around to tell you that you did it all wrong.
And, as someone who’s just starting her new career, retirement feels unimaginable— it’s hard to foresee something so far away.
So, of course, I just avoided doing any of it. I realized I hadn’t properly saved for when my family or I might need the money.
Then panic set in.
And I had to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty.
How it started
Like I said: It. Wasn’t. Easy.
It took me a year to design a customized system. I downloaded multiple Google Sheets templates from financial experts, spreadsheets in Notion, got lost in Reddit threads, and sat through financial literacy webinars.
Nothing really clicked.
I’d start with a system and promptly ditch it: some were hard to track, some involved a lot of math, or my scenario did not fit the template; I felt I was jumping into it all somewhere in the middle.
What I needed was an expert to guide me patiently, by listening to what I needed instead of floating a generic solution. I needed a way to put on paper the way my brain thinks about money, organizes it, and imagines the incoming, outgoing, and the saved.
I eventually found a Sheets template that solved 70% of my problems. It was easy to duplicate for my scenario and track where my money was going by dividing my Monthly Net Pay into Savings Contributions, Debt Payments, Bills / Fixed Expenses, and Variable Spending, all of which had subcategories. It would also calculate my surplus or shortfall to tell me if I was being mindful enough.
A few months later, I realized I wanted to visualize Gullakhs (Indian piggy banks which store cash in earthen containers), because looking at a lump sum amount in my savings account did not help, as I needed to track if I’m saving enough for a car, vacation, etc. I still did not have a retirement or a health savings account, and my money wasn’t multiplying.
How it’s going
So, once again, I’ve chained myself to my chair to research my options. It is painful.
- I have outbursts of shocking realizations: Retirement savings means investing?! (I’m very risk-averse and investing/stocks always seem scary—I cannot visualize them because they appear unpredictable)
- I’m tearing my hair out over understanding associated taxes and when to pay them (Tax-deductible contributions 🥰, Tax-free growth 💕, tax-deferred investments ✨).
- I’m experiencing self-doubt as I explain my research, comparisons, and decisions to the skeptics around me.
I’ve started from scratch again with a new Google Sheet—I now have additional categories, and some earlier ones ( Bills / Fixed Expenses, Variable Spending) weren’t working for me anymore. Maybe it was the terminology or maybe because I still couldn’t “see” inflow and outflow.
I decided to keep it simple: Retirement, Savings, Travel, Life and Investments (took a deep breath, threw caution to the wind and started trading, very slowly and minutely).
This is how I see my life’s priorities. Each has its subcategories, but the umbrella branches help me breathe a little easier because I understand them better.
Every time my paycheck arrives, a certain percentage (a column tells me how much) goes to each subcategory or “bucket” as I call them. Some have a target amount and date (like debt or saving for a big purchase), and every month I track their current balance (in another column, which updates each month automatically).
It’s only been a few months with my new system, and it still leaves me scratching my head when I sit down to scatter my cash into the buckets.
Because:
- I can’t catch a break with the jargon: multiple options jumble up in my head, my thoughts entangle, knot, and strain, leaving me confused and demanding to return this “adulthood” back to nature.
- Wanting to flip a desk because I’m frustrated by trying to do one thing when a new, random word or math pops up on my screen that I now need to research and understand. My investment apps show “Buying Power” or “Currently Investing,” and both amounts are different from what I thought I had transferred.
- I’m overwhelmed by trying to track variable spending, different bank account linkages, uncertain expenses during travels, and unsettled Splitwise accounts.
But I’m getting somewhere. I think.