My Money

• I live with my parents, so I don't have to worry about the rent at the moment
  • Sometimes I wonder how a dire need for money would change me, but I'm not really worried. If I'm by God's side by that time, then He will be by my side, and I'll have all the money I need (and will lack all the money I don't need).
• For the last 2-3 years I've been making about $300 a month (here and there). This is more than enough to feed myself to death, get something to wear, and have all the gadgets I need.
  • At this point I really think I need a streak of real poverty to learn more about myself and loose some weight.
• In general I try to make as little as I can
• My net worth is probably well below $5000
  • I still haven't defeated the fear of "selling it all and giving the money to the poor", which is stemming from my sin of not trusting in Him completely.
• Most of the time I think of my money as of His funds assigned to me. It doesn't prevent me from wasting it on stupid things (like 5000 kc a day, movie tickets, etc.) after a quick apology. As for more substanstial expenditures, I try to clear them with my heart, but since all kinds of shopping are so dirty, it's very hard to get a clear answer. So if my heart says "yeah, sure", I go and buy stuff; if it says "are you crazy? no!", I pretend I can't hear it clearly, and still go and buy stuff. Come to think of it, it's become the standart way of asking MyHeart for advice lately.

Donations

This is not to be bragged about, but since I'm open... evil grin

• I never donated over $50
• Most of my donations are $10
• I mostly donate to open-source projects and individual developers
• The primary value of donation is two-fold
  • I feel better about myself by expressing (a tiny amount of) care for someone
  • A person feels the care, and in spite of the meagerness of the donation feels reassured and often inspired
• Lately it's become more of a technicality to drain my bank account

Donations should never become an incentive for making more money.

History

I first got my hands on more money than I cared about when I started at Gorbushka? . It's hard to add it all up, but I think I made between $700 and $1500 a month. For a teenager, who has lived a simple life and does not care about glamour, that's quite a lot. Bad habits ensued in abundance, but the good thing is at that very time I got some kind of immunity from greed. It had to be reaffirmed later, when I gave up lucrative job offers (thanks to laziness) to tinkering in open-source.

-- Main.AndrewPantyukhin - 09 Feb 2008