To whom much is given

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(Edited)

Image is mine

If there's one thing I enjoy about adulthood, it is freedom. In another sense, I do not enjoy the responsibilities that come with it and sometimes, I would want to wish it goes away but then I'll remember there were times I prayed to be where I am today and I'll just be grateful.

I can never forget what my sister said to me when she managed a fraction of the family business and we had a little fracas. I would always question her what she uses her money for as she was swimming in money at the time and still always complain about being broke. I got really confused with her complaints that one day, I sat her down and questioned her, "what exactly is always making you broke when you earn on a daily basis?"

"Don't you know that the more your finances increase, the more the expenses?" She questioned back.

I looked at her in confusion and then questioned again, "what do you mean by that?" I continued, "you don't pay rent, you rarely buy groceries, you pay no utility bill so what exactly do you use money for?"

She felt irritated with my interrogation, thus she responded, "don't worry, when you start earning, you'll understand what money is being used for."

My sister's response came as an insult to me but I let the whole thing slide because really, it's not my money and I also wouldn't like to be interrogated like that.

For a very long time, I had wished for financial freedom. I had prayed for my own money and I often envisaged what life would be like not being partially or fully financially dependent on anyone.

Gradually, I started taking up several job roles and my earnings improved. While I had thought about how enjoyable life would be having all that money, I never expected the responsibilities that followed suit and it's even more overwhelming being the eldest child.

You know, everytime one or two financial responsibilities come up, I'll quickly flashback to my sister's words. I had always thought that I could still maintain my previous state of life as my income increases, that way, I'd save up more money but boy was I wrong. The more I earn, the more financial burden I incur and the more my personal consumption increases spontaneously.

It becomes more like a dilemma because when I had no financial freedom, I had little or no financial burden. But now, I have financial freedom to some extent and this shoulder loads of responsibilities.

Regardless, I am grateful for the good times and also for the trying and challenging times. Like my mommy will always say, life can not always be sweet but we try to find a balance.

Recently our transformer got bad and we sort to migrate to another power line. While the electricity supply is better in the power line that we migrated to, the tariff is on the high side.

The new bill is about 100% higher than what some of my neighbors usually pay in our old line where we get electricity supplied for fewer hours.

Today when the electricity suppliers/officials came, they had their reservations with our migration. From the previous bill, there's an outstanding payment incurred by some of my neighbors who had no prepaid meter.

Due to the outstanding bill, we were almost disconnected. We had gone through a great deal of discomfort to connect to this new line. Those of us who were using prepaid meters had to disconnect to join the other neighbors using estimated billing.

While using prepaid is far better and cheaper, it will be detrimental to the neighbors who don't have one as they will have to settle with estimated billing. In order for them not to be overwhelmed with the estimated billing, we decided to disconnect from our prepaid and join them.

So today, in order not to get disconnected, my neighbor and I also paid from the outstanding bill that we did not consume.

After everything had been sorted out, the head of the team asked us how we hoped to cope with the new tariff. Immediately, I remembered this prompt, so I smiled and told him that “There's no rose without thorns”.

He smiled back and responded, “to whom much is given, more is expected.”



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6 comments
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hello @bipolar95 please could you provide image sourcing. We are fairly certain this is your own image but we do require you to confirm if images belong to you ;-)

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When we start earning money, our debts start to grow. This is a difficult part of financial freedom and we have to deal with it for almost our entire life.

Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

Excellent day.

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A responsibility we cannot escape from.... Thank you for reading me 🙂

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