You do the math and it doesn't add up. You earn the same as before, you spend on the same things as always, and still, every month there's less left. You haven't changed anything, but the price of the essentials keeps going up. The rise in oil prices feels like a joke, but it's real, and no one knows when it will stop. And if oil goes up, everything else does too. It's a chain.
Gas first. Then transportation, which is what moves the food. Then the food. Then electricity, shipping, the coffee at the corner place that went up twenty-five cents without warning. Nobody sends you a letter explaining why. You notice it at the register, when the total is higher than last time and the bag holds the same things. All because of a conflict between Iran and the United States that you can't quite make sense of.
It's happening everywhere at once. In New York, Madrid, Cairo, Manila. The entire world's economy depends on a single strait.
Right now, to put food on the table, you have to take something out of the cart before you pay and give up the brand you usually buy for a generic one. You have to check the price of everything, even the things you never check, just so you don't feel faint when you hear the total.
And here's the psychological problem. You were taught that money responds to what you do: if you work, it's enough; if you spend carefully, there's some left over; if it's not enough, you're doing something wrong. So when it's not enough, you start overthinking. You go over your spending looking for the mistake. Was it Saturday's dinner? The subscription you don't use? You cut something small and feel better for a couple of days, because at least you did something. The next month, same thing.
Your parents might tell you there have always been times like this. That's true. But they expected the bad times to pass and things to go back to where they were. Now it's not clear where that is. Prices that go up rarely come down. They stay, and the new number becomes the normal one.
So no, it's not that you don't know how to handle your money. It's that money doesn't mean what it meant when you learned how to handle it. What you earn stood still. What it costs to live didn't. And unfortunately, you have no control over it.