<prompt> Human: About me: 26yo male. Graduated college 2 years ago with 36k in student loan debt. Found a good job, but wasnt making any real dents on my net worth for the first year. Ive been using Personal Capital for about 2 years and didnt really focus on saving or getting my net worth up. After subscribing and reading here, I put forward an effort to a 3-part effort to become net positive from a personal worth side:Part A: Increase Savings1. Increase my retirement contributions and switch to standard 401 K from Roth2. Any unclaimed funds got swept to my brokerage accounts to be invested. These went towards common stocks and ETFs. This would leave me with a 500 balance in my checking.3. Auto deposit 50week to my savings account for my rainy day fund4. Consolidate student loans with SoFi to a 10 year plan; giving me a lower interest rate from 7 avg to 5.25, a fixed cost per month, and the cash flow boost so that I could put money away in other areas. Part B: Reduce Expenses1. Eat out less or eat less takeout2. Eat more canned fruits and veggies as sides instead of fresh3. Drink less beer, switch to vodkarumetc at home. I found Ill drink more water doing this too! If going out, bring these to the pregame and make every other drink at the bar a coke.4. Maximize my company per diem on food. I up to get 15day for lunch. I used to get a 7 lunch and would still cook for dinner. I now get a 12-15 lunch and have leftovers5. The biggest help with this was in Part A; having less money in checking and ready to spend made me more hesitant to spend.Part C: Investing1. Develop a strategy and stick with it. Retirement accounts are mostly in ETFS. Brokerage accounts vary between cash and buying on days where everyone is pulling out bought Friday and sold today, brought me 500 pre-tax2. Learn more about investing and dont be afraid to make some mistakes. If you look at the chart, there were some big... horrible loss days. If I had stopped then, I would have made those losses real. TL;DR Living like Im paycheck to paycheck despite not having to made me more aware of my money and forced me to make a decision on how to spend every dollar. Thank you rpersonalfinance for your help and Im proud to say that today is the first time in my life that Ive been worth more than a net 0!EDIT: Thank you anonymous for the gold!  <response>: I had this hiding money from myself strategy down to the pennies. that is until I got married. 