Saving up for transition expenses

Saving up for transition expenses is one of the actions that a nonbinary person may take early during their transition. Depending on the individual's gender dysphoria and other feelings about their body and appearance, some nonbinary people seek a physical transition. A transition may be very expensive, particularly if it includes surgery. Worldwide, health insurance often doesn't cover surgeries that are just for transgender people. As a result, the person has to save up to pay for it out of pocket. This page is written to be helpful for such people, even if they are youth who haven't had much experience with or education about personal finance.

Personal finance basics

Schools could do a better job at making sure that people have a solid grasp of how to take care of their own money (personal finance) by their teens. Young adults tend to learn about it mostly by making costly mistakes. For this reason, this article talks about the basics that make the foundation of good money sense, as well as those that are specifically relevant to transition expenses.

Attitude

You need money sense in order to survive. Understanding your finances needs to be something that you do for yourself because nobody else cares as much about your financial well-being. Never take for granted that any other person or institution will take care of this for you. Taking responsibility for your own finances is part of being empowered, independent, and capable of dealing with your problems. Much of good money sense is founded upon having a healthy attitude about money, rather than being fearful or ignorant about it.

A lot of people see money as a taboo topic, not appropriate for conversation over a meal. It is true that some parts of it are private matters, such as how much you paid for things, and especially how much money you make. Your friends aren't allowed to pressure you into talking about the specifics, because that's rude. It's okay to just say "That's private" and change the subject. However, you can talk to others about other aspects of money, and it's important that you do, in order to learn about it and to help one another. Interview your friends and family about things like tips for saving money. Write it down. You might also arrange a club in which you and your friends meet once a month to each talk about your progress toward savings goals. Telling other people about your goal can help you stick to it.

Some people see money as a taboo topic because of spiritual reasons. The Biblical saying that "the love of money is the root of all evil" (Timothy 6:10) means that if a person cares more about money than other things, their greed can lead them to do things that are heartless. Money itself is neither good nor bad, just a tool meant to be less cumbersome than a barter system. (Imagine having to trade your cow for some medicine.) If you're concerned that it could make you heartless, work on developing your moral compass along with your money sense. Think about your financial decisions in terms of ethical choices. Wise money sense can keep you on an ethical path by preventing the money mistakes that drive someone to do wicked things out of greed or desperation.

It's possible for a person to have lots of money and expensive things, and still feel unhappy, sick, or lonely. In that sense, money doesn't buy happiness. Meanwhile, poverty is stressful because it makes it difficult to take any kind of action, so one feels helpless about every problem. Any of the bad things that can happen to a rich person are worse when they happen to a poor person because poverty means having fewer resources to deal with problems. It's easier to be happy if you can afford your survival needs, pay off your debts to others, and save up for your big goals in life.

Don't see your financial situation as hopeless, as there's no such thing, even when it's as bad as it can get. First, get out of denial, and face the problem in all its detail. Next, talk about it to people you trust instead of keeping it a secret. Find out what actions you can take to address your financial challenges, and start doing something about them, rather than giving up.

Money mistakes

One of the worst mistakes you can make with your money is to be inattentive about it or to be ignorant or in denial about it. Here are some of the different forms this inattentiveness can take:

• Having little piles of spare change and gift cards in different places in your home. You don't know exactly how much, or where. Even if you did know, it's the worst way to store it. This makes it so you don't have a sense of control over your money.
• Using a credit card just because you don't know how much money you have left to spend. Or using cash, but finding out you spent it all without even realizing it. You don't know what's going on.
• When you get change from a cashier, you casually stuff it into the mysterious depth of your bag or pockets, without putting it away neatly. You often find your change after it had a trip in your washing machine.
• Relying on somebody else to completely control your money. This is the opposite of financial independence. It's an unhealthy kind of dependence called "financial infancy." It can be part of an abusive relationship. The victim lacks the resources they would use to escape it, and the abuser holds total power over their decisions, telling them that they're not smart enough to live on their own.
• Relying on someone else to bail you out when you make money mistakes... and you keep on making those mistakes. It's good to have someone you can count on to help you in a crisis, but it's bad to treat that as plan A rather than plan B.
• You're only aware that you don't know anything about your financial situation, and this either makes you feel afraid and unsafe or unreasonably comfortable and dreamy since you're dissociating yourself from it.
• Feeling like your financial situation is hopeless, so you can't bear to look at it in detail. You think there's no use in taking action to make it better, so you do nothing. You intentionally try not to think about your money.

It's not just bad money sense to be inattentive like that, it can be dangerous. You need self-discipline and responsibility. Every day, you need to know exactly how much money you have, and where. You need to have a budget and plan for goals. You need to take control of it yourself.

Gambling is one of the worst money mistakes. It can seem like a way to make quick money, and some people think of lottery tickets as an investment, but these are both wrong. It's not a source of income, since there's no guarantee you'll get anything, and it's not an investment. Gambling is designed to be addicting, making you spend more than you have. It can put you in such deep debt that you're tempted to do wicked things to pay it back, such as crime. There are better ways to make money than gambling, quick or slow. For example, a gambler can spend USD$50 a month on the lottery for 40 years, for a total loss of $24,000 with no wins, whereas an average investor could have grown that nest egg to about $400,000.

Expense tracking

It used to be that people with good money sense would carry a little blank book with them everywhere. Whenever they spent or received money, they'd write it down in the book. Then they could see how much they had, and see patterns in their spending habits. Some people still like to do this on paper, or manually in an Excel spreadsheet. However, you don't have to do this all by hand: you can make it much easier for yourself by having computers automatically keep track of the details for you.

Create an account on Mint.com, and set it up so to automatically get (aggregate) information from your bank accounts. Mint is made by the same company as made the software that most online banking systems are based on. Mint's software is as secure as that of your bank. Mint makes it so you have just one place where you can see all your recent spending and earning activity. Mint creates charts of which areas you tend to spend in the most, shows bar graphs of how much you have left in your budget, and how close you are to reaching your saving goals. This all helps you develop your money sense. Set yourself a reminder to look at your Mint every day. By looking at your Mint every day, you can also be quick to spot suspicious activity that could indicate identity theft and react to it in time to save yourself a lot of trouble.

Primary source of income

The money you earn is called income. The main source of income is work.

If you don't have a job, your job is to get a job. Treat your job search seriously, putting in as many hours a day on it as you can. Treat your job search like it was a class. Use a calendar, take notes in a notebook, establish a tidy filing system, manage your social network in an address book. Keep track of everything you do or plan for your job search, and the dates, times, and phone numbers associated with them. Back up your files. Take at least one job-search-related action every day, because the worst mistake you can make on a job search is to do nothing.

Develop a professional image. Create a formal, brief voice mail greeting. Your email username should be firstname.lastname, or as close to it as you can get, instead of an informal username. Don't bring your parents into contact with a potential employer, because you want to look independent.

You don't want to be unemployed for more than a few months. At that point, any job is better than no job, so it's best to settle for "survival work," such as in nearby retail centres and businesses that are easy for you, even though they're not in your field or directed toward your career. These are minimum wage jobs that nobody mentions when they talk about what they want to be when they grow up. People don't stay in them for long, which means they often have job openings, and you can get hired quickly. You don't want to keep working there long, either. While you work there, spend your off hours still searching for a job, one that's better than this one.

If you recently lost a job, expect to be unemployed for more than a few months, or if you have a disability or other circumstances that make it so you can't work, then you need to research benefits that your government gives to such people. If your country supplies it, this is usually a very small amount of income, and it may come with stipulations that limit your ability to save up money for a big expense, so a day job is preferable, if you're at all able to do one. In the USA, some relevant benefits include unemployment income, Social Security Disability, food stamps, food banks, and household bill assistance. You can also research charities that might help people such as yourself.

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