Tag Archives: spending

New Year, New You

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There’s something refreshing about the start of a new calendar year and a new semester.  A lot of people make New Year’s resolutions.  But I think most people go about their resolutions in the wrong way.  And doing that makes it easier to fall off the wagon.

Possibly the most popular of all resolutions is the vow to lose weight.  I’ve made and broken this resolution multiple times.  Because it’s easy to break a promise to yourself to do something.  So this year I resolved to live like a healthy person.  Healthy people make better food choices.  Healthy people exercise.  Healthy people take the stairs instead of the elevator.  I’m not going to DO something.  I’m going to BE something.  I’m going to be a healthy person.  As a result of that behavior, I will likely lose some weight (I hope, I hope, I hope).  And if I have a bad day of living a healthy lifestyle, I won’t feel like I have failed the whole project.  I can wake up the next morning and still live like a healthy person.

Many folks also resolve to spend less money.  Or to build a budget.  Or to save more.  This is always on the top of my mind as well.  This year I’m choosing to be someone who makes smart money decisions.  I’m not going to DO.  I’m going to BE.  People who are smart with money pay themselves first.  This means I’ve got an automated savings deposit scheduled for every month….and what is left after that is the amount I have to live on.  Financially savvy people know where their money goes.  This means I am tracking my spending.  I can easily look up how much I spend each month on various budget items.  And if an area of expenditure seems to be getting out of control (as so often happens in the month of December), I know that I need to make adjustments going forward.  And most importantly, people who are smart with money don’t spend on things that are not important to them.  Live music is important to me.  My home is important to me.  My camper van (or home away from home) is important to me.  I don’t feel bad about spending money on indulging these three things.  Clothing is not important to me, so I always buy secondhand.  Cars are not important to me, so I drive a 13 year old Subaru.  Fancy coffee is not important to me, so I brew at home and carry it to work in my travel mug.  There are a lot of places in my budget that I could easily spend more money on things that are not of importance to me.  But that’s not who I want to BE.

Have you made any resolutions for the new year?  Who are you planning to be?

My, How Things Have Changed

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This morning I saw a child walking to school.  And it struck me how something so completely normal now seems weird to see.  A lot of things that used to be perfectly normal in February are unusual in Covid times.  It’s odd to see people standing close together (it even triggers me when I see it on TV!).  I cringe when I see people without masks.  Name brand Clorox Wipes are impossible to find, and I rush to text my friends when I find the off-brands in stores.  And I generally don’t go to stores.  My groceries come from curbside pick-up.  Beer from my local brewpub is delivered to my front porch.  Eating restaurant food now means takeout or delivery.  Concert tickets are now sold by the car for a drive-in experience.  My commute to work is now a walk from my living room to my guest room.  And meeting with students one-on-one now involves a webcam.

A lot of things have changed in life to accommodate the Covid-19 pandemic.  How we spend money is no small part of that shift.  My impulse purchases in stores are WAY down.  Because I don’t go to stores.  By ordering my groceries online for pick-up it forces me to think about what I need in advance.  In the before times I would retrieve a cartload of grocery staples from the store every weekend, and my husband (who does most of the cooking) would make a supplemental trip to the store nearly every day to get things he wanted for that day’s dinner.  Now I place an order once or twice a week for pickup and my head chef works with what we have on hand (in what he calls the daily mystery box challenge).  Our grocery budget has definitely decreased due to this change.

It almost sounds like the pandemic would be saving me a fortune.  But that’s not true at all.  Everything gained on groceries and gas seems to be spent on my own sanity (retail therapy—the struggle is real!).  Clothes and gadgets that I used to buy at Goodwill are now coming from online retail sites….at a higher cost.  Restaurant food (which is typically a Friday night treat for us) now comes with a delivery charge.  Additionally, I seem to have developed a fabric purchasing habit in an effort to make masks so cute that I can’t wait to wear them.  And writing this makes me realize that I really should focus some effort on reducing my food delivery and Amazon expenses…

Times are weird.  And things have changed, including how I spend my money.  How have your spending habits evolved with the pandemic?

How Much is OK to Spend on Hobbies?

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As you may already know, one of my favorite hobbies is performing in community theater musical productions.  Just yesterday I closed a production of Sweeney Todd at Altoona Community Theatre.  And all that time on the road between State College and Altoona got me thinking about hobbies and how much money we spend on them.

This particular theater production racked up a pretty hefty tab for me. $5 for sheet music for the perfect audition song.  $30 for the right pair of period-appropriate shoes for my ridiculously small feet that no theater group ever has shoes to fit.  $20 for a makeup kit.  $12 for a commemorative Sweeney Todd t-shirt.  $5 toward a gift for the directors.  Probably $50 in convenience foods that I wouldn’t have purchased were I not in a show and super busy.  And then there’s gasoline.  I’ve driven my car more than 2,500 miles just going back and forth to rehearsals (an average of four 80 mile round trips per week for the last two months).  And even in my Prius that works out to more than $200 in gasoline.  So in the course of two months I have spent in excess of $300 on a hobby.

I take some comfort in the fact that this particular hobby is sporadic for me.  This is the only show I’m planning to be in this year, so $300 a year on a hobby doesn’t sound nearly as horrifying as $150 a month.  But it’s still not something I would be able to attempt if I were working on a smaller budget.  I feel fortunate to be able to sink my money and time into something I love.

So how much is ok to spend on your hobbies?  That depends largely on how much income you have and how much your other expenses are.  Any hobby can be as expensive or inexpensive as you allow it to be.  If your hobby is following a sports team, that can be as cheap as watching games on TV or as expensive as buying season tickets to watch every game in person.  If your hobby is exercise, that can be as cheap as one pair of running shoes or as expensive as purchasing your own home gym.

Every hobby has a low and a high price point.  The trick is to recognize where within that range you can afford to fall…and to make sure that’s where you stay.

Conscious Spending (a classic tip from 1/31/2011)

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More and more often I’ve been hearing the phrase “conscious spending.”  But what does it mean?  It’s more than just knowing where your money is going.  It’s about making a conscious decision to spend more money on some things and less on others—in fact really scrimping in some areas to allow yourself to spend more on the things you truly want.

Conscious spending is about defining your priorities and spending your money to best meet those priorities.  It becomes clear to me every time I talk to my friend Heather.  Heather’s top spending priority is travel.  She will cut back in every other area if it means she can take a trip…to anywhere.  I’m exactly the opposite.  I don’t care if I never travel, because my top spending priority is my home.  Home is the place I most want to be, and I do spend a relatively large portion of my money on not only the house itself, but also improving it and decorating it nicely.  That is what is important to me.  I’m content to buy my clothes at Goodwill, drive old cars, and vacation in a tent in a state forest only a few miles from home if it means that when I come home, it’s the home I want.  Heather doesn’t care if she stays in her rental apartment forever, as long as she gets to travel (without sleeping in a tent).  And we are both very happy with our decisions.

Everyone’s spending priorities are different.  For some it’s clothing.  For some it is a car.  For some it is food.  For some it is entertainment.  For many reading this, I suspect it’s education.  But the thing to remember is that you should make that conscious decision about what things are important to you and make a plan that allows you to spend some of your money on those things—even if it means you have to make cuts in areas that are less important to you.

What are the things that are most important to you?  And what are you willing to give up in order to spend your money consciously on the things you most value?