I posted recently at Wise Bread about “frugality fatigue”, the idea that Americans are tired of being frugal and breaking out their wallets for a little party time.
I might resemble those remarks. In the past few months, I’ve bought:
- The car.
- The first new bras I’ve bought since my last baby was born. They’re five cup sizes and two band sizes smaller than the nursing bra I walked into the store wearing. I’ll say it was time for replacements.
- A new heating system for our house, to replace the 40-year-old oil-fired boiler we inherited with a high-efficiency gas one.
- A lot of travel. I went to two out-of-state weddings and a holiday gathering. That was probably most if not all of the travel I will do for the year, packed into a single month.
- Some parts for my computer so it can, you know, function.
- Replacement parts for the oven.
- My iPhone!!! I promised myself I’d buy an iPhone with the first large~ish check I got for my freelance writing work. The check could not have arrived at a better time, the same day my toddler knocked her front tooth out in a playground tussle. The iPhone is even better than I thought it would be, and has already paid for itself in saving me from missing appointments and deadlines.
There’s just been a very great deal of expensive stuff breaking and happening in my world. Part of it is random chance – who knew the baby we were waiting for would be born sick? why did my cousin and my close friend schedule their weddings on back-to-back weekends?
Some of it is because I’ve been so frugal for the past year. If I’d bought new clothes when my clothing size changed, I wouldn’t have had to do it right before the weddings. If I’d replaced the car when my mechanic first said it was on its last legs, I wouldn’t have had to do it this month.
I’m finding that while many expenses can be done away with entirely, many others can simply be postponed or reduced. This fall represented a traffic jam of sudden expenses.
In all of that, I dropped the threads of some of my small stuff too. It’s hard to economize heavily on groceries when I’m juggling strings of zeros in my ledger. Perfect example: the day we bought the car, we also stopped for lunch at a pizza place, where we spent probably $30 on calzones and drinks and cookies. We never eat like that anymore, but what was $30 next to the $13,000 we were laying out for a vehicle?
Still $30.
I’m not worried about getting back on this wagon though, because I’ve been through the process already. I know how to cut spending to a bare minimum, and how to step away from a buying mindset. I’m not psyched about doing it as we head into the holiday season, but for today I’m feeling pretty Zen about leaving all the shiny things on the shelves.
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