Why I save

By: Chronicles of a Father with Cents As I continue on this financial journey towards having financial freedom, I go through all of my accounts periodically and see how my net worth keeps building. I have no debt and haven’t had any since I paid off student loans more than five years ago. I am so privileged on how far I have come from my relationship with money. Even with all of the financial mistakes I have made, my wealth keeps building by the week and month. I have to say to myself why am I doing this? I can’t save just to save right? I must have a real reason or maybe several reasons why my mindset has been too ingrained to keep saving. There are the basic reasons like for retirement, keeping an emergency fund, to provide a nice cushion for BwC’s college fund and to save for a home we’re still pursuing. But there has to be some deeper meaning to having this task to keep building my wealth. After doing to self-analysis, I have come up with my real meaning of saving:

Keep My Family Financially Secure

Building my wealth and passing it down to BwC and, hopefully, his kids are something that would be grateful for me to do. To have a legacy where my money is used for their well being whether it’s for a home, school, and food, I hope they can appreciate that I want to help my family as much as I can. By diligently saving and saving so they can have a prosperous life can achieve the goals that they so desire. I don’t want BwC and generations down my family to experience what I had financially where I didn’t really put a high priority it. Building up debt and keep paying student loans are a couple of setbacks that hopefully they don’t go through them. Providing financial advice to BwC is one of the goals I have as he becomes more aware of the concept of money. I think more than anything, providing the next generation with a sense of financial security is something I want to do and push to do so.

My Health

The older we get, the more expensive health care gets especially here in the United States. I haven’t look too far the line of the next 10, 20, 30 years of how much I need to save for health insurance but I do know is it can quite get expensive. Quite simply the older we get, the more we need to rely on going to the hospital keep our health as good as we can. With my lifestyle always determined to work out whether that’s doing some push-ups at home to going out for a run, I always feel that whenever I get some free time away from BwC, working out is always on the top things I do when I have that opportunity. I believe if I keep that mindset for wanting to run, do some workouts at home or maybe down the line sign up for a gym membership, I think I can maintain a healthy lifestyle in which will hopefully prolong my days here on earth. Also eating right is a vital part in having a healthy lifestyle.  We just traded in our old Vitamix for the newer version and we will make use out of it by making healthy drinks and hot soups.  Sometimes I will crave some In N Out burger but for the most part, I try to be conscious of what I’m eating and I hope it can help my body to be in good health. At the same time, I need that financial cushion for my health especially when I hit my 50s and into traditional retirement age because you never know.  I could be a gym rat or eating right but there can always be something that can go wrong with my health. So far I’ve never had any health setbacks throughout my life, I have great vision and never had any major injuries.  Hopefully, I can keep being healthy as long as possible.

Able to Travel to Wherever I Want

I really love traveling.  I was able to do a lot of it in my 20s by going to various cities in the U.S and a couple of international trips.  But at the same time, I built up some credit card debt by doing all this traveling.  I really cut back on traveling in my 30s as I paid off all my debts and student loans and started to build my financial nest right after. Now with BwC, we want to take him on various trips. We want to take him to cruises, RV trips, theme parks like Disneyland and abroad to various continents. And by taking him to all these places, we want to do it without having any financial setbacks. I mean right now we have the ability to do that but we have other goals we want to accomplish first like buying a home and setting him up for school. _.