<prompt> Human: I may be in a rather unique situation due to the rather high but almost certainly ephemeral nature of my earnings, but I was hoping that someone in a situation close to mine could give me some advice for how to spend my money smartly and without anxiety. To give you a little background, Im 27 out of school for 5 years living on the West Coast in a relatively high cost of living city. I work in an industry where you are paid based entirely on performance extremely low base-salary and where one bad mistake can potentially cost you your job overnight. To make matters worse, what I do is highly specialized and its relatively unlikely that I could find a job that pays nearly as much if I were to be fired.Not only is what I do all performance based, but the opportunity and hence my pay can vary drastically year to year. To illustrate this, my income over the first 5 years of my career has been:Year 1: 40kYear 2: 70kYear 3: 220kYear 4: 310kYear 5: 110kAnd its looking like year 6 I will make even less than I did in year 5. From this income Ive managed to save 370k in an investment account, 120k in my retirement account, and about 80k in my savings account. I know this is a lot of money for my age, but due to the nature of my job I find myself getting incredibly anxious whenever I need to spend money. For example, the other week my girlfriend wanted to plan a trip with me to visit her friends in Atlanta. The whole trip would have cost us probably four or five hundred bucks, and even though it sounded fun I kept on trying to find excuses not to go so that I wouldnt have to spend the money. Now I dont consider myself cheap, I enjoy spending money on the people around me in ways that I think will make them happy, but I feel like Im constantly passing over opportunities that would be fun due to my concern about money. I envy how she can spend money seemingly without worry even though she makes 40k and seems to enjoy it to the max when I become so nervous and regretful when I spend a similar amount.I always have nightmares about losing my job overnight and having my income shrivel before my eyes. I also think about the future and how expensive a house and kids are. How can I better balance life and money? Am I erring on the way too cautious side or am I being smart with my money?  <response>: Perhaps you need to add a certain amount of fun to your budget?Or, if youre really highly anxious, you might want to talk about your anxiety with a professional. 