Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone
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Living a life where less than 100,000 KRW remains in your bank account after paying fixed expenses and living costs every month is incredibly draining. This is a common situation faced by single-household office workers within their first three years of living independently, who earn between 3 million and 4 million KRW per month. While YouTube advocates for the "zero-spending challenge"—starving yourself and spending absolutely nothing—honestly, that is an impossible mission that only leads to binge eating after a few days. The problem is not your willpower, but your smartphone environment, where everything is resolved with a single click of a payment button. Instead of blaming your fingers for choosing delivery food and calling taxis late at night while lying down, you need to set up annoying obstacles along the path where your money flows out. Just by properly designing physical barriers, you can easily keep 300,000 KRW in your bank account every month.
Humans give up on spending as the payment process becomes more annoying. Since simple payments have erased the pain of spending, we must artificially restore that pain. This is a method of fiercely tangling the payment steps so that the brain perceives the reality of spending money.
By setting up these three defensive walls, you will immediately save more than 150,000 KRW from the micro-payments you used to make unconsciously every month.
You have probably experienced losing an entire weekend to piled-up cleaning and laundry. Entering Monday without having relieved your fatigue leads to ordering delivery food and taking taxis during the week due to a compensatory psychology built up over those days. Outsourcing household chores is not a luxury, but a defensive investment to maintain your spending control on weekdays. According to a 2017 study by Professor Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School, people who spent money on time-saving services like cleaning or cooking had significantly higher life satisfaction than those who spent money on material possessions.
I propose a formula to set aside exactly 10% of your after-tax monthly income as a "Time-Buying Budget." If your after-tax income is 3.5 million KRW, use 350,000 KRW every month solely to make your body comfortable according to the formula below.
If you rest well over the weekend and recharge your physical strength, the cost of ordering delivery food out of anger and spontaneous spite spending on your way home from work on weekdays will decrease noticeably. A virtuous cycle occurs where you enjoy more than 4 hours of complete freedom every week while also protecting your balance.
The reason 70,000 to 80,000 KRW is blown on a single social gathering is because of unplanned second and third rounds of drinks. Card swipes made gallantly while heavily intoxicated return as a terrible headache the next morning. To prevent this excessive spending on the day of the gathering, you need a system that locks down the costs a month in advance.
By locking down gathering expenses in advance, you can have a great time every time you meet while dropping the average spending per gathering significantly from the previous 70,000 KRW level to the 45,000 KRW level.
Saving by holding back with willpower eventually brings a yo-yo effect. Instead of obsessively locking away money, changing the system of how money flows lasts much longer. The quantitative changes that appear when you implement the introduced methods for a month are shown in the table below.
| Evaluation Metric | Before Application | After Application | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average Monthly Surplus Funds | Less than 50,000 KRW | 350,000 KRW or more | +300,000 KRW |
| Weekly Free Time | 2 hours (Chore fatigue) | 6 hours (Rest secured) | +4 hours |
| Monthly Impulse Purchases | 8 times or more | 2 times or less | -6 times |
| Average Spend Per Gathering | 70,000 KRW | 45,000 KRW | -25,000 KRW |
Securing 300,000 KRW of surplus funds every month is simpler than you think. On your way home from work today, start by deleting all the simple payment cards installed on your smartphone. Your body might become a little more inconvenienced, but your bank account will surely get thicker.