Hi! Joining in. If you don’t know me, I’m a librarian and mother of 2 elementary aged boys and have also been doing fertility treatment for a couple of years (my mom pays for most of that) in a possibly futile effort to produce offspring with my current spouse. I came here from MMM, where I have been since at least 2014, when I was still married to my first husband.
I have good frugal instincts but they have been a bit lulled by having a partner who doesn’t spend all the $$ (so less pressure on me), creating more of a feeling of abundance.
Clothes spending has been KILLING me lately. I have gotten significantly larger over the past year and change between the lockdown and the fertility treatment, and had to replace pretty much everything I own. I love me some Stitch Fix–everything I buy from there I get compliments on. But now I have a bunch of stuff and it’s time to slow my roll and chill on the clothing front until the change of seasons. (Well, I do need a new dress if I am going to this black-tie-optional wedding in October…)
Ah, Target. I have been going weekly and I wonder how much I could cut our spending if I just didn’t go so often. I mean, there is always something that seems important (eg, a butter dish, so we have somewhere to put the unsalted butter), but it’s never urgent and there’s always that “what else do I need at Target?” question.
Spouse and I both work full-time or almost full-time so time to employ money-saving tricks is highly limited. If a kid needs shoes, I usually just get on dsw.com. If I feel like I don’t have anything to wear to work, I order a Stitch Fix. And to some extent that’s to be expected but I am trying to bring more awareness to the process!
Spoilering for a lot going on! Mindset stuff: I'm deciding if this is the right group journal for me or not (totally fine, if not, we're all on different journeys). Comparison of hypothetical extreme frugality and hypothetical dieting, but no discussion of dieting specifics. Mention of TTC journey.
I’m deciding if participating here is the right thing for me or not! I am in a more spending-heavy phase of life: my wife and I moved into a new house that has some neglected maintenance issues and dated details, and we don’t have much furniture. We are trying to get pregnant without access to sperm at home, and the process that seems to be right for us also seem to be the more expensive way to do it. I’m thinking about a career change that wouldn’t involve going back to school for another degree, but might involve a few thousand dollars in other expenses. So, expensive things are happening that we don’t have a ton of control over, but we’re investing in our future.
Some of the ways to save money here would be in conflict with other things we have going on: e.g. with the house maintenance stuff, lots of people save money by DIY-ing some of it. I don’t know if I’d say I’m disabled, but I have poor motor skills, spatial thinking, some unpredictable chronic pain stuff, and some unpredictable low energy stuff that I’ve lived with for a long time. This all sounds dramatic and it’s at the level where I don’t think most people in my life know that anything is going on with me, besides maybe thinking it’s weird that I don’t drive or work out more, but I’m going to struggle more than the average person with, say, hanging curtain rods. My wife pitches in with this, but also works a lot and doesn’t get a ton of free time to do fun stuff, so I don’t want to cut into that time too much.
I also think my brain is wired in a way that extreme frugality doesn’t work for me in the way that dieting or tracking food doesn’t work for some people. It makes me stressed out all the time, I obsess over it, and it’s just not good for my mental health. I saved $20K over two years in my 20s while living in San Francisco, working at an entry level nonprofit job, and still mostly having a social life, so I know how to do it, but it’s just not conducive to happiness for me. I’ve been so broke that I would walk the two miles to work instead of paying $2 for the bus, and for me personally it is just not a sustainable path that brings joy. I am also vain as hell and don’t want to look back at my life and think “wow, I could have been so much hotter.” That said, I married someone who would spend the day working out of her car to avoid paying for coffee so that she could work in a coffee shop (pre-COVID), so we end up kind of walking a middle path.
So, that’s me! I don’t buy a lot of clothes or have expensive hobbies, besides keeping my dog alive. My most expensive vices used to be Sephora, eyelash extensions, and Pilates classes, but I developed rosacea-prone skin (so I have to be careful about products), an allergy to eyelash extension glue (a tragedy), and exercise intolerance, so those things are out. My wife and I didn’t go out to eat a lot, even pre-COVID, and are good about keeping fixed expenses low. We love to travel, but are decent travel hackers.
I deleted & unsubscribed from a sale email and noped out of the Nordstrom Semi-Annual after checking to see if any of the wedding guest dresses I wishlisted were still available in my size (no lol. they never are). Feeling good today lol
I decided to join this because I’m kinda dealing right now with the challenge of having a steady income for once and trying to utilize it to save a lot of money, but also hating watching some of my savings (like for trips and stuff) go down as I try to take advantage of the fact that I do have a steady income.
July will probably be the first month this year that I take some cash OUT of my 2021 savings category instead of putting it in because I decided to enroll in a German class for $700 for the year. I think it’s the right decision but i’m struggling with spending money when it’s coming at the expenses of savings goals.
Here’s where I’m at:
I was focused on saving cash last year due to having this regular income, and that was very satisfying because I find cash comforting. But once I hit $35K in cash and gained access to a 401K, I decided I needed to shift my focus into my 401K + my solo IRA.
Right now, I’m contributing 43% to my 401K ($1,800 per month) and about 15% of my business net income to my solo 401K (varies). But this is screwing with me because I was used to putting aside $1200-$2000 per month in cash. Now I only have about $200 left in a paycheck after my regular expenses and it feels like I’m failing - even though I don’t need to assemble more cash at all! I have 18 months of expenses in cash, I don’t need more.
Anyone else have any tricks for handling getting the smaller paychecks due to 401k?
I’m sort of in a similar situation. We’ve upped 401(k) contributions, are naturally wanting to spend more because we’re making more, but we also have less coming into our accessible accounts. I feel like we’ve struggled to save cash since increasing the contributions and that bothers me too, even if net worth is generally increasing. I don’t have a solution. I’m hoping a general overhaul and better reporting of what I’m spending will naturally bring out my former habits? Haha, we’ll see if it’s a bike scenario or not. LMK what you try!
I track all the pretax account savings in the same or adjacent place that I track cash savings. I actually do it in two places: I try to update the account balances in YNAB once a month so it’s reflected in my net worth, and I track contributions in a google doc (I started doing this during the Race to the Max last year and kept doing it this year).
I hope you stay, without feeling like you have to match anyone’s intensity.
I, for one, don’t want to set stricter rules for myself, because even the rules I am following now are extremely arbitrary. Moreover, the pandemic has really changed how I feel about certain kinds of spending ie supporting local businesses and “voting with my wallet.” I’m here to explore what feelings drive me to spend, where I could make better choices, and where I might actually need to be OK spending more to align with my values. Though I suppose that last isn’t money saving mentality so that might stay on my journal.
Today I stopped coming back from a work meeting to pick up prepared lunch at the supermarket. Convenience (not having to figure out/prep lunch at home) is the obvious reason, but there is also a pandemic intensified “must do something since I’m out.” Or maybe, “this is my chance to get something” and I won’t have the chance later (this is the Covid reinforced part where we only left the house once in 3 weeks)
Same here. I track all cash savings and investments the same as I track the rest of my spending.
I’ve made a list of pantry items for us to eat down before our move. I’m 90% doing it so that we don’t have to move as much stuff (who wants to move canned tomatoes 900 miles?), but I’m posting about it here because I think this helps support a good mindset for me, and one which definitely saves money: To do this, I have to use what I already have and be creative with it, which tends to be a positive cycle for me where I feel good because I made good tasty use of something I had, and then I’m inspired to keep doing that.
I do the same thing too! Both the YNAB and the spreadsheet.
It doesn’t seem to work well enough to convince my brain - probably because the cash savings is on-budget and the 401K is off-budget? I dunno I miss hording cash.
Here’s my cute little spreadsheet (there’s even more, there’s a second tab that calculates gross income from OMD and my charity percentages, etc)
This is me for sure, I have huge FOMO around, like everything, even groceries or takeout. I know it is because we locked down so hard and didn’t even step inside a building for almost 6 months except to literally get vaccinated. and I fear that happening again because delta.
Oooo following - this will be me when I go back to work. I was supposed to be off for 12 weeks for unpaid maternity leave so I set my 401k to a higher percentage so I can still max it out by year end. But then they gave me another two months off, and now when I go back in September, I’m going to have to send most of my paycheck there to max it out by 12/31. I expect it to be kind of discouraging to not really get much of a take home check. Humph.
More generally, I’m following along here because we had a baby and convenience spending went high. That’s ok for a while but now she’s 3 months old and we’re hiring childcare and I need to cut things back down so we can afford it. We also might want to buy a house, so I’d like to save more money in the E fund for repairs and general housy things.
Ooof moment on money psychology for me today. Just navel gazing, so skip if uninterested.
So far in my daughters life, we’ve spent very little on clothes. We’ve been lucky with hand me downs/buy nothing and gifts, and I’ve rolled with what we have. But lately I’ve been buying her some things, new, off the rack, that aren’t needed. At first I thought it was a symptom of her getting older- she’s developing very clear preferences and interests and I like honoring and highlighting those. But it hit me today, as I was contemplating a totally unneeded pair of pants for her, that more than anything I think it’s because I’m starting to feel a deep panic that I won’t be able to have a second kid and this is my only chance to pick out clothes like this. That was a bit of an oooof for me. Money is so rarely about the money
Following along because my husband and I are getting ready to have our kitchen renovated and it’s hard to make myself care about keeping other spending in check when we’re about to drop five figures on the renovation.
We spent a long time living on a pretty tight budget so that we could save up a down payment. Between spending on the house and wanting my super extroverted husband to be able to get out and enjoy things after being home for over a year, it’s been an extra expensive year.
I’ve also been more interested than usual in spending money on myself, especially clothes and shoes. Some of it is legitimate needs, but when I’m buying things anyway it’s easy to say yes to picking up something I don’t really need just because it’s cute.
I don’t necessarily regret the spending we’ve been doing, but we can’t keep going at this rate forever. Time to do some thinking about values and priorities.
I both want to send you hugs for the oof but also want to say thank you for saying that. I had one hour to teach personal finance to a bunch of age-out foster youth today, and I spent about 30 minutes of it talking about the emotional sh*t involved in money instead of just like explaining credit scores because I was like “if I skip this, you’re gonna learn this lesson much later. you can learn about credit scores anytime, but if I talk to you about the fact that money isn’t just about money, it’s gonna save you more time and energy than anything else I can teach”
