Living On Your Own
We all have to start somewhere, but we don't have to begin with a misstep or two. A little planning, a little patience, and moving out on your own can be less anxious, stressful, or even disastrous.
Living On Your Own
A Little Planning and Patience will Help
Moving out on your own is going to be a big challenge. There are solutions to moving out on your own and successfully making it that are discussed later in this post, but let me set the stage for this constant conundrum for many young people in their late teens and twenties and sometimes well into their thirties. If you are still struggling in your forties, your choices earlier in your life may have had more severe consequences.
Moving out of the place you grew up to strike out on your own requires an understanding of the expenses you will have to pay. I have heard of “adulting” courses in high schools. I realize that my own children probably learned their knowledge of it by observing us as parents because we didn’t teach them about it with discipline and diligence. Now, I am seeing so many late teens and twenty-somethings struggle with finances, managing a bank account, creating and keeping a budget, credit card debt, car loan payments, monthly car insurance, gas, food, utilities, and more, although most can manage to keep their cell phone working and get an updated model fairly regularly. But when you decide to move out of whatever home was into your own space, reality can hit pretty hard.
It reminds me that I need to reach younger audiences, even as young as early teens – hopefully I can hold their attention. Those teens and twenty’s years can establish the foundation of good credit or bad credit, and bad credit will cost you much more than a low credit score. Mortgage loans, car loans, car insurance, and utility deposits will all be higher when your score is lower, which means your monthly payments will be higher. This will increase the pressure to make more money, either hourly or on salary, to pay for your standard of living. It makes saving difficult, and without money in the bank, a down payment on a car or home or rent deposit for an apartment remains out of reach.
I am hearing from many young adults who are really struggling. They can’t make the bills. They are begging friends, family, or strangers for money and last month’s unpaid bills roll into this month’s bill, and before long, they are behind and unlikely to catch up. Then they flake on their bills, and their credit score falls into the 500s or below, and only the high-cost finance companies will extend any kind of credit.
Drugs or some other addiction, job jumping, an arrest or two on your record, or being a single parent will complicate this – massively. You need your head screwed on right and tight to hack your way through life and be in a really good head space to make a good go of it. Sickness makes it difficult, especially when it is coupled with medications that make you feel tired, weak, fuzzy-headed, or nauseated. Being a victim of a violent crime or coming back from war makes the climb to some kind of regular normalcy, much less being in a secure lifestyle, additionally hard. Physical issues or mental challenges can add to your challenges. Life can really pile on the weight of obstacles to overcome, so adding avoidable ones isn’t recommended.
If you have already ‘screwed up,’ then it is best to stop whatever you are doing that builds the roadblocks ahead of you and go in a new and better direction. This can also be a form of repentance. Biblically speaking, to repent means to rearrange your entire way of thinking, feeling, and being to forsake that which is wrong. But there is one more step – heading in a new and better direction. It may also be necessary to clean up some financial messes if you have made those in the past. Leaving an unpaid bill unpaid will hurt your credit score – for a long time. Carrying the guilt of emotional damage you caused to someone else without making amends will return to your head for years to come and likely retard your efforts in that new and better direction.
If you haven’t made a real mess of things so far, now is the time to plan your future instead of just winging it. If you have made a mess of things, you will learn a lot of positive things by fixing things. That won’t be easy and will require significant humility, but it will do more to polish your character than trying to forge ahead without making things right.
For individuals just starting out, I suggest any of the Adulting books on Amazon.com, whether paperback or the Kindle version. Gaining an understanding of what you will be up against in life will prepare you for a far more successful future than bumbling forward and making all kinds of avoidable mistakes, whether with money, relationships, bills, goals, business dealings, jobs, bosses, friends, or family. The world is filled with humans, and you will be interacting with some of them in nearly everything you do. You will be far less likely to become a victim of someone else’s bad ideas or evil intentions if you prepare yourself in advance.
Life requires work unless you intend to live under a rock, off the grid, living on that which you can kill and eat, in a cave or hollowed-out log somewhere – and even that lifestyle requires survival work. You could live in an institution or a tent city, but my hope is that your designs and desires in life are far greater than that level of mere existence. And the solution is to read and prepare yourself for that which lies ahead and is unavoidable.
I encourage you to S.T.O.P. – Stop – Think – Options – Proceed. Cease movement so you are in a space where you can think about where you are and the things around you, examine your options, and then make a sound decision to proceed in a reasonable direction. So, for the solutions to living on your own, read through a few Adulting books and get a sense of what lies ahead. Then, you will avoid many of the mistakes that will make life much more expensive, vastly more frustrating, filled with difficulties, and far less rewarding than you want.
Next Steps:
- Gain and understanding of monthly money cash flow – what you need to bring in, and how much will go out. You can obtain a simple monthly budget layout by emailing me: info@timgrady.com with Budget in the subject line.
- Fill in the blanks. Month 0 is for deposits you will need to rent a place to live and get the utilities turned on. Months 1 – 12 list expenses your will need to pay to cover the bills and survive.
- If you do the roommate thing, make sure the roommate is committed to the entire term of the lease and does walk out, leaving you holding the bag – or you would do that to someone else.
- Before you move into your own place, be sure you can afford to do it. If your job is unstable, you don’t have one, or you quit, you will either be couch-surfing (sleeping someplace) and mooching off others, or you will be scrambling to keep that roof over your head.
- When you know the costs, and can control your money, you will be in control of a major piece of your life.
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The Peak to Peek Principle by Rev. Robert H. Schuler
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Total Self Confidence by Dr. Robert Anthony
The Magic of Believing by Clause M. Bristol
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You'll See It When You Believe It by Dr. Wayne Dyer
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The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz Ph.D.
Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Cashflow Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki
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