How much money do you spend, in order to remain healthy and alive? Believe it or not, bad choices can cause your death and you never know when you will have an emergency that can cost you thousands of dollars.
Therefore, it is important that you make a list of those yearly expenses that continue to help you to remain healthy and alive. You will be creating what is known as a survival budget for the year so that you can estimate what you will have remaining from your expected yearly income to spend for other things.
Buying food and those expenses for the place in which you reside are your number one concern. What does it cost to feed yourself and what do you spend for rent or a mortgage and the Real Estates taxes and insurance cost of your home? Keep in mind that insurance protection is important to protect the value of your Real and/or personal property.
If you are not retired from the workforce you will have to travel, in most cases, to and from your place of employment, which means that you will have to have or used a mode of transportation in order to earn a living or, in other words, support yourself. You use public transportation, car pool or drive to the workplace each working day of the week. So now you should add your transportation costs to your annual survival budget. Such costs include fuel, maintenance of your vehicle and vehicle insurance.
Those living expense dollars add up to what you estimate to be the cost of your standard of living. Having totaled those expenses you subtract that amount from your expected annual income. How much money do you have left for those other things that you will need, like clothes, medical expenses and various forms of entertainment?
Having fun is a part of life too. What do you like to do when you are not working? Since each of us is somehow different from every other person who is alive on Earth only you can answer that question.
The end result of creating such an annual budget is to determine if you can also save some of your current income for your future retirement. Before that time comes you could die, but most likely you will not die and you can easily remain alive past 70.
So you must now decide if you want to live for the here and now, by spending all of your income. Or, you save some of that money for a time when you are no longer able to work so maybe you can take that once in a lifetime vacation or have a hobby that can consume some or all of your free time. Traveling the road of life, as you are, you know full well that the road is filled with joy, sorrow, danger and tragedy and you will certainly experience them all before you pass away.