Recently a post on Twitter by @optimizoor blew up about him still using the MacBook Air 11" featured here:
And I thought it was absolutely phenomenal, but I could also relate to it since I had the exact same one up until about a year ago (😂). I remember it well, as it was dead slow, had 4GB of RAM, and at the time I was dying to upgrade due to my courses requiring multiple VMs to be running at the same time. My poor laptop kept huffing away, but it wasn't exactly the optimal solution. The post got me thinking though (oh no!), and I wanted to remark on a few things that have helped my mindset through the last couple years of university and getting started in the professional workforce.
Vectorized is a killer dev with a huge following (2.5k GitHub, 25.3k Twitter). If he can produce such great results with just an old underpowered MacBook, what does one person really need to succeed? I'd argue the only thing they need is a stable life and a laptop, but someone could probably undercut me there and say just the laptop would do. There are definitely times in ones life where spending money on nice things is totally a-okay, and those times are when you have a budget that says it's okay to spend that money. If you've got $300 in your bank account, purchasing a $100 microphone (or whatever) because you "need it" isn't the best excuse.
Budgeting Your Money
The subreddit financial independence's flowchart is where I always point people who are starting out, and it's what I follow to this day. I think it's extremely important because of the nature of the work of Web3 auditors and programmers; a lot of them might be getting paid in crypto, and if it isn't USDC there could be potential issues with volatility. This flowchart and the book "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" are going to be the scripture you follow to keep your money safe in the long run. There's a ton of degen influences within the Web3 community that can push even the most sane people to make stupid bets on things like meme coins. So read the book, follow this chart, and understand where your money is going each month.
Note to security auditors: Make sure you have emergency savings, as you never know when the well might dry up 🛢. Markets can go through cycles 🔄, auditing platforms can come and go, and vulnerabilities are never guaranteed . Stay safe out there.
Budgeting Apps
There's a ton of them out there, but I personally use Copilot. If you're making over $50,000 USD per year, the $99/year subscription fee is most likely worth it due to the ease-of-use of the app to keep an overview of your entire financial profile month-to-month. The app lets you see each individual transaction that comes and goes from each credit card, debit card, bank account, etc. that you connect to it. You can then review, tag, annotate, and sort these transactions, and set budgets to abide by. Another simple rule I use just to do quick math in my head with my salary is the 50/30/20 budget. 50% of your spending is your needs, 30% is your wants, and 20% goes towards savings. As long as you are generally within those numbers, you should be good to go. If you can't tell yet, I'm all about making this as simple as humanly possible to make sure I'm not leaking money each month.
Looking for Alternatives to Save Money
It's easy to see a new shiny piece of software/hardware and think you need to have it. Thinking it'll "up your game" just that much more to the next level that it justifies the cost. I recently caught myself doing this with a microphone. My current microphone I have on hand I bought about 10 years back for $60 from a college student moving to India to create a short film, and the mic itself is a Blue Yeti Pro (original retail $130).
This mic was killer. It STILL is killer, and is absolutely overkill for what 99% of people would need a mic for. But yet here I was with what I was calling my "old" microphone, thinking I needed to pickup some new fancy Rhode or Razer mic to get better audio quality. Making a long story short, I realized I just had to put in the work to make my current mic work better. This includes things like getting the settings configured correctly, picking up a $10 windscreen, and learning how to use free audio software to perform post-processing. The overall lesson here, is that there is almost always a way to avoid spending the money you think you need to spend. If you do actually need to spend the aforementioned money, then there isn't anything you can do about it and you can spend it without feeling bad or "wasting" it. This creates a mental framework that makes it easy to justify spending money on needs, and makes it much harder to spend non-budgeted money on wants.
The same thought process can be applied to software too. A lot of my friends were paying $15-$20 a month to subscription note taking apps in college, just so that they could have their notes synced across devices. That's $240 a year! Why would you do that instead of just spending an extra bit of time Googling and teaching yourself how to sync markdown documents using GitHub?
What Now?
Keep grinding it out! Keep hustling! We are all in different situations, making different amounts of money, in different parts of the globe. Some of this advice won't apply to some people, but I figured if it could help one person it was worth putting out there. Hopefully the above resources are able to help.
