Absolutely. It is a sad reality that those who would benefit from a windfall the most are the least likely to receive one.

It's a resolution of mine to reduce Going Out and Dining Out. The Going Out category includes all my vices...alcohol, nicotine (a big expense I finally was able to quit thank god), as well as any other drugs.

As for the saving, I think I was able to save this amount because at 26, my expenses are about as low as they ever will be, given I live with roommates, have no dependents, and student loan payments have been frozen for the past year plus.

Lastly, I am grateful for the $20k but it came from the sudden death of an immediate family member, so it doesn't feel very lucky but it's still a privilege I suppose. The way I look at it is that it's as if I don't have student loans, because the amounts are roughly the same.

It's easy to do this and I'm not perfect by any means but it's important to not make judgments based on face value.

I have $28K in student loans. I didn't make payments, because student loan payments have been frozen for the past year plus, which helped me save way more this past year.

My inheritance was from the sudden tragic death of an immediate family member. While I am grateful for the money, I would trade it all and more back.

My parents worked blue collar jobs. I attended public schools and public university. I didn't even know what government consulting was until my senior year of college when I needed to start applying for jobs. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I still don't - I just knew I didn't want to worry about money the way my parents did.

A few years ago, a post like this one in this subreddit inspired me to start tracking my expenses and begin budgeting. I posted this visualization to get some congratulations but also to hopefully inspire someone else to take control of their finances.

Government consultant for IT

I agree with you, thank you. I just wanted to make it clear I wasn't taxed on it but it would look much better to do that further up the waterfall for sure

There was a period of 3 months where I was too depressed to track my expenses and I didn't feel like going back and inputting 3 months of transactions all at once, so I just took the total amount for those months from my credit card statements and lumped it into the miscellaneous category to at least have the dollar amount in the tracker.

Misc isn't used much but it's typically for weird expenses that don't really fall into the other categories. For example, fines from my apartment building or amex membership payments

Inheritance is a dollar amount I received from a deceased family member and it's not taxed. I wanted to make that clear so I thought I would include it separate from taxable income but as another person mentioned it probably makes more sense to include it further up the waterfall.

Visualization is called a Sankey Diagram made via a free site called Sankeymatic.

Data source is a personal finance spreadsheet where I manually inputted income and transactions throughout the year.