By: Revanche

The ways I avoid spending

August 29, 2018

A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.

If we’re just talking about the literal HOW DO YOU DO IT, these are the technical steps that I take:

First up is willpower!  This is the weakest of the ways. Willpower is finite.

Depending on how challenging your days or your life feels, it can be so limited as to feel non-existent! I understand this: if you return to The Precious ten times and say no ten times, that’s 9 other times that you could have been saying no to something else or exercising better judgment.

However, it’s the most important initial set of brakes on the impulse to buy. Once I say no the first time and it pings my consciousness again, then I push it to the next step.

Sometimes I’m fresh out of willpower but I have just enough energy to pull out the credit card. Oh let’s not pretend I don’t have that card number memorized. I do.

So let’s say I don’t even have willpower or the precious little left needs to be preserved. Call in the reinforcements!

These pretty sparkly pretty (sparkly!) Star Wars flats lured me in ….

And BAM, my friend knocked them off the list. That doesn’t mean I don’t want them anymore. They’re sparkly. Of course I want them. It just means I let her make the decision for me and I embraced the no. Thank you, friend. I appreciate you.

The Wish List. If it’s purely a want, but a niggling want that won’t go away, it’s tossed into a Trello list so I don’t actively think about it anymore. It has to be on there for at least a year before it passes onto the “want and maybe will get” category. More than a year is more realistic because, to be totally honest, putting it on the list gives my brain permission to forget about it. It doesn’t rise to my consciousness again after that until the next time I add something to the wish list. At that point, I might add one thing only to delete a couple of cards that have shed their allure.

During that time, take pride in longevity. For replacing old things, we relish how long their use can be stretched out. Aim for a high average age of possessions that you truly use. For example, my yard sale hair dryer is over 20 years old. I used to sit on the floor of my red carpeted room and blow dry my hair at night during high school. The low setting broke three months ago but the high setting still works!

For guests, we have my nicer $8 Conair hair dryer bought from a Black Friday sale we wandered into twelve years ago. Still looks like new, works like a charm. Our drying rack has been broken for at least three years now, slumping alarmingly to the side every time it’s nudged a micrometer. But it still does the job.

Set high standards + encourage forgetfulness. I refuse to buy most things at regular price, it’s rarely urgent enough to need to pay full price. That by itself wouldn’t help but then I inadvertently miss every sale. This happens with the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale every single year, including this one. Even best intentions to pay attention fail because the sale always overlaps with more important plans. This has saved me $200 a year, minimum. Play to your strengths (ahem weaknesses), I always say!

I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways to keep your money in your pocket but this is what works for me. As a family, it’s even easier for PiC and JB because all they do is ask me if we can buy whatever they’ve got their eye on. I make the decision based on the monthly numbers and the annual savings goals, and say yea or nay.

If we’re talking about strategy, though, it boils down to this:

Prioritized life goals! Our biggest life goals are centered around saving and investing so that we can retire earlier than ages 60 and 65. That gives me a framework around which all our spending decisions (and that first no) revolves. Within reason we can spend without thinking about that but when I review the monthly spending, I take the whole year’s spending and savings, into consideration.

Now, we aren’t sacrificing everything right now simply by the power of knowing that ultimately we will care most about being able to retire. That’s difficult to sustain for a decade and also a waste of a decade. How are we going to feel if we die in Year 9 of Total Ascetism because the only thing we cared about was saving for a retirement that will never come? Trick question, we won’t feel anything because we’d be dead. But you get the point. I did that in my teens and 20s. While I’m glad that I did it, I’m gladder that I did it when I was unmarried and it was just me that missed out on life.

Now that we have a family, we’re balancing lower key todays with our desired tomorrows.

NOTE: I’m not saying spending is bad! This whole process is for unnecessary or unbudgeted spending.

It works really well. Too well. I’ve been intending to buy books from Scholastic for months! Whoops.

:: How and when do you choose to save instead of spend?

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