By: Revanche

Our philosophy on money in 2024 in three purchases

January 24, 2024

Much has shifted, though not everything, over my 15+ years of blogging about money.

I still don’t think or trust that “money happens”. Some folks can! I kind of admire that. I’m not sure if that’s a developmental stage I’ll ever reach (if things continue going well for us) or if I’m simply incapable of being that laissez faire about money with my background. Who knows? I never would have predicted progressing to where I am now, not even 7 years ago, and my background will likely always play a role in informing how I think and feel about money. I’m trying to keep an open mind – previously unthinkable changes have happened.

In the past 12 months, we’ve purchased an expensive car ($$$$$), an expensive e-bike ($$$$), and paid for an expensive birthday party ($$$) for one kid. The other kid got a tiny cake.

I would have, in the past, stressed about each of these greatly. In detail. Separately. Cumulatively. I’d be vibrating with the tension, anxiety and fear.

For the car, I would have insisted we have all the cash set aside on top of our emergency fund before we even thought about looking at any vehicles. That would have been an unreasonable amount of cash to hold for a prolonged period of time. And I’ve done that before when I was fearful about our money situation and regretted being so conservative.

This time, I stuck to my commitment to continue investing cash until it was time to buy. Only after we bought did I redirect cash from investing to replenish our savings. It wasn’t comfortable, I get a twinge when I think about it but it did prevent us from skipping two-three years of investing while we searched for a car that was so unavailable. I could not have foreseen how badly the car search would go when I blithely said in 2020: ah we can go another 2 years before we get a van, it’ll be fine. We’ll make do. We did make do with rental vans, and almost laughable attempts to pare down our necessities when traveling, but that became increasingly difficult because everyone wanted a minivan at the same time. Even if we had booked ours six months out, they’d still try to substitute our booking with something uselessly smaller. It once took PiC 5 hours to pick up our rental because of the shortages. This is normally a 20 minute or less process. Taking this route lost 5 months of investing and I’ll ease back in early this year by splitting our uncommitted cash between replenishment savings and investing to get back on the horse sooner than later.

For the e-bike, I would have scraped and saved every penny of the commuting benefits that PiC received before we had to return the loaner. I would have insisted that he choose the cheapest possible model and that he wait until I had the cash in hand for it even if it meant skipping months of bike commuting. (It turns out that blogging about it could have saved us a bundle but our replacement window was sudden and short, the loaner was recalled with very little warning.) Instead, I increased our mutual aid when we had a bit of freed up cash thanks to the benefits. By and large we prioritized the well-being of humans (and/or dogs in some cases) over the comfort of hoarding that money. I let him choose what made the most sense for the family without letting price dictate the choice. I encouraged him to do it right away and not wait. He did do a substantial amount of research, and search for used bikes, but none of the used bikes that came up in conversation later were posted or sale or available when he was looking.

His health and happiness are much better when bike commuting, so it was worth it to spend the money on a high quality bike that will hold value and be safe for him and the kids. It’s also important that people who are having a rough time get food to eat or make rent etc right now, not some time in the far off future when we have “enough”. We might never have the kind of enough that truly quiets my inner money demons. In this less neurotic approach, I am trusting that my money management overall will carry the day. I view my choice to help out folks we’d like to see survive and thrive as an investment in a better world. It’s not tangible enough to banish my money fears but it is meaningful enough to appease the scared troll inside my heart that is my bag lady syndrome. It’s a little bit more “live for today” than I’ve ever been before.

Speaking of living for today: I’m not making JB repeat my childhood where birthdays aren’t important enough to spend money on (or remember, even). They are a party sort of people and I’m decidedly not so we choose to make parties of different types and sizes happen for them each year depending on how we feel. We don’t give them everything they ask for every time but we do give them some of the things they’d enjoy some of the time and they always have a grand time. An investment in their happiness, their feeling valued, and in making memories with good friends is a good way to spend money, I’m learning.

I wonder if I’d feel differently about parties and taking up space in the world if I’d been raised to believe I mattered enough for that. I didn’t even think I mattered enough to anyone to impose on them to be part of my bridal party when we got married. I’ve never admitted that out loud but that was the real reason I didn’t want to have any attendants. In retrospect, I feel a touch bad that that meant PiC didn’t have his guys stand up with him. I have no recollection of asking how he felt about that, though. Maybe he didn’t care. I was protecting myself with very hard shells at the time, though, I might not have been willing to open the door to that discussion. Anyway, the idea of attention on me is still anathema so maybe my feelings would be the same!

What happened??

About six years ago, I cut my dad off. First, I found out about the theft. That shattered my heart. Then his rent was going up and I couldn’t afford to keep paying for his household bills anymore. I had barely been making it work but between his rent increasing by a huge percentage and our needing to qualify for a new loan, it just wasn’t possible any longer. I gave him months of notice when I found out about the rent increase. He promised and he promised that he would make up the difference in the rent and, as usual, he was lying.

It was such a painful severing of ties but the effect of that is I have had several years in a row of financial stability. For the first time in my life, I only had one set of bills to pay, and two steady incomes to cover them. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t being jerked around by the spending or accidents or emergencies of grown damn adults who could and should have taken personal responsibility but inched it over into my lap bit by bit until I realized I was holding the bag for everything. Now, making the monthly bills is a given. I haven’t had to worry about scraping by one month to the next or prioritizing essential bills – I just pay them. Higher bill months – I just pay them. Lower bill months, great – I just pay them. The benefits of just being able to meet your living expenses month after month consistently just cannot be exaggerated. I’ve finally begun healing from the fear and panic that I lived in from 9 to 35 trying to pay all the bills with less than enough.

Obviously, not everything has changed.

I still fret about money, big and small things alike. I check bank balances daily to make sure gremlins haven’t gremlined (or that I haven’t forgotten to make a payment). I did a possessive badger snarl when PiC said my phone (Pixel 6 but he thought it was a 2) should be replaced like his (iPhone SE). I fussed every week when we paused investing.

The threat of layoffs, reorgs, and other major changes at our jobs at any given time keeps that fearful part of me revved up. We’re comfortable as long as the checks keep coming. A job loss or major illness could easily erase all these years of mostly frugal choices pretty fast and knowing that makes me feel like we’re still just one big step away from paycheck to paycheck living. I worry about whether we can save enough for retirement and healthcare in retirement and our old age. Thinking about how granny’s care costs $200k per year, my most pessimistic spending projections don’t go that high and I’m not sure how to build it out to cover end of life care costs like that.

And of course I worry about climate change making the earth totally unlivable by the time we retire or in our late years and what do we do.

Despite how little control I have over these things, they also have less control over me. I’m not acting completely out of fear anymore. And I’m very lucky to have come through that hard period. It felt like it’d never end.

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