Hudson Valley Astrologer

“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough”

~ William Blake

In astrology, the topic of budgeting may relate closely to the houses related to work. The houses corresponding to work are the second house (income, and personal belongings), the sixth house (habits, the work environment), and tenth house (one’s job, profession, career). Depending on the condition of these houses and how aligned one is with the vocational outlet identified by the chart, could suggest how effectively an individual is able to budget their income and resources. However, even a promising horoscope doesn’t necessarily override the other forces at play in an individual’s life: other forces including globalization, technological change, tax policy, anti-union sentiment (wage suppression), cronyism, racial and gender disparities, wealth and income gaps, inflation, and instability of income can influence negative wealth effects.

Spoiler Alert: Most people are paycheck to paycheck!

Above is an excellent spreadsheet from Wealthtender.com that depicts net worth percentiles by age, and dramatically shows the disparity of wealth in both terms of age (time) but also in terms of what percentile a generational cohort might be included. What is not as clearly demonstrated is the number of people scrambling to save a buck versus the few who proverbially have “more money than God.”

The average wealth of the top 10% ($6.9 million) dwarfs the bottom 50% ($51,000), creating structural barriers to those trying to climb the economic ladder. When income is constrained by demands on the budget, creating and building wealth become inhibited, the wealth gap widens and perpetuates. Income gaps and instability of income worsen this effect especially for populations at the lower income levels.

Here is an amazing video that pretty much covers the water front and saved me a ton of typing.

My Saturn is in the second house and budgeting has always been a bugaboo of mine. Jupiter rules the second house cusp, and so the hope and aspiration has always been for more income coming in than I actually realized. Sagittarius on the second house cusp suggests a propensity to spend more than one makes, and this has certainly been true for me. However, I’m not alone when I zoom out and look at the bigger picture. A consumer society thrives on debt, and the availability of debt often exceeds the ability to payback what is borrowed. Banks have this figured out and why they charge excessive interest rates on credit cards. High rates of interests make writing off bad debts affordable.

In order to budget one needs to know how much money one will make. Only a small percentage knows this number. They are professionals, successful salespeople, business owners and investors with passive income. If sales are down, or someone experiences an interruption in employment, god forbid we hit a recession (and we will) then the budget goes out the window.

I’m in a pretty good place right now but it hasn’t always been the case, and although I am not ranked in the top 9% of wealthy individuals, I am also not in the bottom 50%. However, I struggled in my career, leaning my ladder of success up against the wrong wall for too long, and falling off on occasion, forcing me to start all over again, while maintaining a household and supporting a family.

In order to get into the top 9% category of wealth holders, it is important not to skip a beat. First, one needs an income that is both better than average, but also stable (no disruptions in employment). Second, per the radical FIRE method (Financial Independence, Retire Early), there are extreme budget approaches that can extricate one from the rat race. While spartan in its approach to spending and savings, and leveraging the stock market’s secular bull market, it’s also an embarrassingly privileged approach, one I wished I had the perspicacity to follow.

HVA

💚🍀