Every few months my spouse & I bring up Cut-Throat's "What are you saving it for?" sentiments. We heartily agree that he's absolutely correct and then we go right back to clipping coupons, doing our own house & car maintenance, and shopping at Goodwill.
It's not cognitive dissonance-- we agree that we can spend more. We're not even at 4% yet.
The "problem" that we're confronting is that spending doesn't seem to hold much value for us and we don't get around to it. We're in a comfortable parenting & recreational rut and we have plenty of other things that we'd rather do. For example I prefer surfing to watching a movie. We'd be happy to own a Prius but it's just as easy to nurse along our beat-up eight-year-old Nissan Altima. (Of course I'd love to do the aftermarket battery mod to a Prius...) I don't have a lot of power tools toys to take care of. We don't play dress-up. I don't want to dust more junk tchotchkes. We dive but I don't golf. I enjoy picking stocks but they're making money. We enjoy Costco pizza more than fancy restaurants. It's more fun to plant veggies & harvest fruits with my FIL than it is to listen to his complaints about produce prices.
Some spending has warmed up. For example spouse does Saturday-morning garage sales and sometimes blows as much as $5! She's also discovered Craigslist (dozens of husbands just went "Ruh-roh..."). In the last month we've squandered $100 for an electric mower (she's very happy, and so I'm happy) and $175 for a screened swing chair. I see a lot of possibilities for the swing chair-- a canopy with mosquito netting, a nice comfortable swing that folds out & locks into a full-size futon, a variety of comfy pillows. It's perfect for that transition from talking/reading to napping or other al fresco activities. (We call it the "kissing chair" so of course our 13-year-old & her friends want nothing to do with it.) I bought a new computer instead of a new power supply last year, and now my FIL can have the "old" computer instead of his 1990s Win98 relic.
I read a ton of books, mostly through the library, and my reading list is nine pages long. Lately I've decided that if I can't find them at the library within a year or two, I'm gonna spend real money at Amazon or eBay. I probably burn through $150/year, donate them to Goodwill, and take the tax deduction.
We're getting ready for a summer vacation-- probably a meander from Gettysburg (kid loves the Civil War) to DC & Annapolis (Smithsonian, college tours, family & friends). We could probably spend 10 days, however the kid wants to take summer school PE and they haven't put out the schedule yet. I'd prefer to avoid touring that part of the country in July but we might have to suck it up. So that's a few thousand dollars, well within the budget, to listen to a couple weeks of "You live in Hawaii and you're vacationing HERE?!?"
Now that the solar projects are out of the way, we're working on rain barrels & landscaping. Three plastic 55-gallon drums cost $30 and we'll probably connect them to the gutters for another $20-$30 in parts. Free water for the downhill slope anytime we want. If we wanted any more than this it'd require a cistern.
One day the kid will fly out of the nest and I'll get my storage shed playhouse workshop back. But it doesn't have electricity so I'll need to drop conduit from the meter, underground, under a lava-rock wall, and down to a sub-panel. Another $250 or so of hedonistic spending.
The other project under "design review" is replacing the back lanai. The 17-year-old painted concrete is gouged, wavy, & peeling. Replacing it is pretty straightforward (although the property's lava-rock walls call for a 50-foot grout pump or a buttload of wheelbarrows) but of course it's not that simple. First, my spouse (ruh-roh again) wants to widen the sidewalk along the house. But to do that we'd have to move the mature gardenias away from the kitchen & livingroom windows. And then we'd probably want to put up a pergola along that wall so the support pillars would have to be coordinated with the sidewalk. As long as there's a lovely pergola to walk out to, we should probably replace the LR windows with a French door. Oh, and before we replace the back lanai concrete we want to even up the slippery lava-rock steps going down to the back slope, which would probably require extending the staircase by cutting a slot into the lanai. So we'll have to replace the wrought-iron gate, one of a matched set of three around the house that might as well be replaced in a package deal. And as long as we're destroying the yard, let's kill off the jungleweed lawn and start over with El Toro zoysia. Or should we turn some of that into a raised-bed veggie garden, irrigated of course from our rainbarrels?
At which point we nod our heads & agree that we should do something about that someday. She goes back to watching HGTV ("Dream House" or "Groundbreakers") and I check the surf forecast.
Empty-nesting-- mmmmmm. Diving in Chuuk? The Great Barrier Reef? Spending a month in Thailand? A week in Monterey? No problem, we're all over it.
So, those of you in the withdrawal phase of your lives, is anyone else baffled by habitual frugality? What are you spending it on?
It's not cognitive dissonance-- we agree that we can spend more. We're not even at 4% yet.
The "problem" that we're confronting is that spending doesn't seem to hold much value for us and we don't get around to it. We're in a comfortable parenting & recreational rut and we have plenty of other things that we'd rather do. For example I prefer surfing to watching a movie. We'd be happy to own a Prius but it's just as easy to nurse along our beat-up eight-year-old Nissan Altima. (Of course I'd love to do the aftermarket battery mod to a Prius...) I don't have a lot of power tools toys to take care of. We don't play dress-up. I don't want to dust more junk tchotchkes. We dive but I don't golf. I enjoy picking stocks but they're making money. We enjoy Costco pizza more than fancy restaurants. It's more fun to plant veggies & harvest fruits with my FIL than it is to listen to his complaints about produce prices.
Some spending has warmed up. For example spouse does Saturday-morning garage sales and sometimes blows as much as $5! She's also discovered Craigslist (dozens of husbands just went "Ruh-roh..."). In the last month we've squandered $100 for an electric mower (she's very happy, and so I'm happy) and $175 for a screened swing chair. I see a lot of possibilities for the swing chair-- a canopy with mosquito netting, a nice comfortable swing that folds out & locks into a full-size futon, a variety of comfy pillows. It's perfect for that transition from talking/reading to napping or other al fresco activities. (We call it the "kissing chair" so of course our 13-year-old & her friends want nothing to do with it.) I bought a new computer instead of a new power supply last year, and now my FIL can have the "old" computer instead of his 1990s Win98 relic.
I read a ton of books, mostly through the library, and my reading list is nine pages long. Lately I've decided that if I can't find them at the library within a year or two, I'm gonna spend real money at Amazon or eBay. I probably burn through $150/year, donate them to Goodwill, and take the tax deduction.
We're getting ready for a summer vacation-- probably a meander from Gettysburg (kid loves the Civil War) to DC & Annapolis (Smithsonian, college tours, family & friends). We could probably spend 10 days, however the kid wants to take summer school PE and they haven't put out the schedule yet. I'd prefer to avoid touring that part of the country in July but we might have to suck it up. So that's a few thousand dollars, well within the budget, to listen to a couple weeks of "You live in Hawaii and you're vacationing HERE?!?"
Now that the solar projects are out of the way, we're working on rain barrels & landscaping. Three plastic 55-gallon drums cost $30 and we'll probably connect them to the gutters for another $20-$30 in parts. Free water for the downhill slope anytime we want. If we wanted any more than this it'd require a cistern.
One day the kid will fly out of the nest and I'll get my storage shed playhouse workshop back. But it doesn't have electricity so I'll need to drop conduit from the meter, underground, under a lava-rock wall, and down to a sub-panel. Another $250 or so of hedonistic spending.
The other project under "design review" is replacing the back lanai. The 17-year-old painted concrete is gouged, wavy, & peeling. Replacing it is pretty straightforward (although the property's lava-rock walls call for a 50-foot grout pump or a buttload of wheelbarrows) but of course it's not that simple. First, my spouse (ruh-roh again) wants to widen the sidewalk along the house. But to do that we'd have to move the mature gardenias away from the kitchen & livingroom windows. And then we'd probably want to put up a pergola along that wall so the support pillars would have to be coordinated with the sidewalk. As long as there's a lovely pergola to walk out to, we should probably replace the LR windows with a French door. Oh, and before we replace the back lanai concrete we want to even up the slippery lava-rock steps going down to the back slope, which would probably require extending the staircase by cutting a slot into the lanai. So we'll have to replace the wrought-iron gate, one of a matched set of three around the house that might as well be replaced in a package deal. And as long as we're destroying the yard, let's kill off the jungleweed lawn and start over with El Toro zoysia. Or should we turn some of that into a raised-bed veggie garden, irrigated of course from our rainbarrels?
At which point we nod our heads & agree that we should do something about that someday. She goes back to watching HGTV ("Dream House" or "Groundbreakers") and I check the surf forecast.
Empty-nesting-- mmmmmm. Diving in Chuuk? The Great Barrier Reef? Spending a month in Thailand? A week in Monterey? No problem, we're all over it.
So, those of you in the withdrawal phase of your lives, is anyone else baffled by habitual frugality? What are you spending it on?
If this post hadn't been so long and lacked reference to the Norwegian widow, I would have sworn it was from unclemick. Heh heh heh
