If you’ve had savings that have either been completely or largely depleted, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not saving more over time or for spending money on things you maybe didn’t need. I don’t think this is completely fair, though, but I wanted to write about it.
It is possible for you to save money your entire life, only for your savings to be destroyed by some cataclysm. It’s highly unlikely, but still, it’s possible. Does that mean you should never pay for a vacation or enjoy some trivial habit? I don’t think so. I don’t think it does anybody any good to live in fear of this. I don’t think you ever need to apologize for living your life, for buying groceries, for having entertainment, for needing to spend money on your car. If you have decent income, I also don’t think that living in survival mode is even remotely healthy.
…however, what if life has pushed you into survival mode anyway?
If I hold my credit card balance until the new year, I can save about 16% in taxes on my next IRA withdrawal. That’s a lot of money. Given that I now pay less in rent than I used to and will hopefully be able to substantially reduce what I’m paying for health insurance (long story), I’m thinking I might be able to get my money to last another 4 or 5 months, though hopefully I’ll find a job well before then. I guess what’s weird is realizing just how much waste was baked into my spending: now that I need to be very conservative with my money, it’s amazing how little I really need to spend. Back when I was working and banking half my income, I reached a point at which I was no longer increasing my savings rate, and allowed a little lifestyle inflation to follow my pay raises. I would defend myself in this endeavor on several fronts, but I guess I’m haunted by one question: did I really need any of that? Is my life substantially better because I decided I enjoyed buying shit on Amazon and thought that increasing my savings rate above 50% would be “extreme”?
To be fair, I have some very nice things that were 100% worth buying. But I don’t know that those were worth all the slack in my budget over all these years. They were typically one-off items, not monthly expenses. God knows what happened to all the loose dollars I decided to piss away (well, God and my ledger, but I don’t want to dig too far into that, if I’m being honest)
This is a curious thing to me. I don’t think the poverty spirit is good, and yet, the poverty spirit is pretty effective at keeping your from buying dumb stuff. The downside of course is that you tend to neglect the things you actually do need, or the things that give you life. I don’t think the purpose of life is to spend as little as possible – there’s really no virtue in that. Only, after all of these years, I’m convinced that “being good with money” means having some kind of propriety with money that actively works in your favor, a sort of “equitable distribution” according to all of the things that make life worth living. Having storehouses of high-quality junk does not make people better for it, and so we can think of that as being a waste. But people severely lacking in things that improve their lives are also hurting. Both options suck.
One central assumption that I think could be a pillar of figuring all of this out is simply that there is only so much stuff you either can or will use on a regular basis.
Weak analogy warning!: We are constrained principally by time. For example, if you had your own large arcade, how many of the games could you actually play in your free time? Either you would play a few very often and the others hardly at all, or you would play all of them for somewhat equal, if short, periods of time (which is rather unnatural). Aside from these options, you might not play any games at all, negating the entire purpose of having your own arcade. You might say, “Ah, but Risky, what if I only want to play a game every few months?” Well, you can add that to the docket and keep it, sure, but eventually, other things in your life will take priority, or you’ll get bored with one game or another. The beauty of not owning a whole arcade is that you can pay a nominal fee to play the games you seldom enjoy, whereas the ones you frequently enjoy might actually find themselves in your home instead. My point is, hardly anybody would have time to play every game if they owned a whole arcade, but this is essentially what people do when they collect vast sums of crap. “I’ll use it some day!” It saves a great deal of time, space, and money to choose very carefully what you expect to actually use in your life. I spend very little time camping, but fortunately, my camping gear doesn’t take up much space, and I don’t go looking for more of it!
But what about books? Ah! Yes! I have come full circle, for it is in fact time to get rid of books again! My principal regret with buying so many is that I didn’t bother to check them out from a library before deciding whether they deserved a spot on my bookshelf. That’s like buying a lot of gear for a new hobby before you know if you actually enjoy it. Some books can’t be checked out from libraries, and that’s fine, but other times I’ve been surprised to find that a book was available to check out at the nearest library, but because I didn’t ascribe much value to $30 (I do now!), I took the lazy man’s approach and just bought it. A friend suggested using libraries more, and only very slowly is my brain recalibrating to take this approach.
I have a stack of books I’d kind of like to re-read before (probably) getting rid of them, but that’s an awful lot of reading! The more critical approach is to ask, “Do I truly intend to read this book again? If I do, will I actually do so?” Very often, the answer is no. I have spent many hundreds or even thousands of dollars on arcade games I don’t much enjoy, so to speak. Was this worth the slack in my budget? No! And I don’t think it would have been any deprivation to stop that crap and save my money instead. It simply requires you to think a little and be patient. When you don’t do that, you end up with 8 heavy boxes of books to contend with when you move, when only perhaps a quarter are giving you any value at all. It hurts to phrase it that way, but it’s true!
What is nice about having a decent income and no debt, though, is that you can easily afford to buy really nice versions of the things you enjoy the most. In my opinion, that’s one of the best ways to make use of abundance (though the subject of giving would be another critical thought, I’m just not writing about that today)
What’s interesting, too, is how cheap food can be if you bother to make it yourself. My breakfast burritos are still hella cheap, and almost naturally, my grocery spending has gone down. I think last month alone, I actually undershot my $400 budget for the first time in ages, I believe just from paying attention to the price of things, rejecting wholly unnecessary luxuries, and focusing more on buying ingredients. I’d love to get my spending down even further, and I think that I can.
Okay, that’s all my brain can process for now, I need to get some other stuff done today. No doubt I’ll have more thoughts on all of this later.