New challenge to be a bit more mindful with attention investment in social media (aka Youtube): I'm going to take a stab at how I would answer the prompts I find most tempting to click on when they bait my feed...
Immediate inspiration by Gabe Bult (but also many other minimalist bloggers over the years), 10 Things I Won't Waste My Money On. Here are my 10:
1. New Cars, leased cars, changing cars before the maintenance cost exceeded their utility to us. Never bought one new and drove it off the lot. I've always gone the pre-owned route, and when possible, consolidated to a shared vehicle or no vehicle (i.e. Sex & the City early 20-something season, DINK cohabitating with coworker carpool the mid-30's season). Paradoxically, our last 2 vehicles are worth more now than when we bought them, but I never thought of a car as an appreciating asset and this is probably due to inflation, supply chain issues, and increased incentives to move toward EVs. ($4K+/year)
2. Extra kids. I never pictured my adult self as having a backseat full of kids. Sure, there is a little pressure to "cheaper by the dozen" to justify my existence as a SAHM and what some have called the "motherhood penalty," in gender-based wage differences. But at the end of the day, the one kid we have is exactly what we wanted and we love her to bits. I also totally respect the folks who choose to be childfree, but would say I massively discounted the personal growth I experienced (not to mention ability to function under chronic sleep deprivation) pre-kid and if you're growth-oriented, seeing how fast a kid learns up close and personal is humbling and inspiring. Future me may wish there were more heirs to help us through our dotage, but I'd rather take the money we would have plowed into more kids and plow it into building up savings and investing in our health to mitigate those risks as best we can. Now, arguably, some of this savings is wasted on keeping an aging pack of 2 "fur kids" but hey. ($24K/year)
3. In-store grocery and Target shopping. Case in point: put toddler into the shopping cart, wheel her into the store, in her rear-facing position, she immediately sees a strategically-placed $40 toy on the shelf next to the entrance. Now to be fair, that toy has kept her occupied for more cumulative hours than the equivalent hourly investment in a babysitter, but was it a necessary purchase? No. The same thing happens routinely with Target (and to a lesser extent, pharmacies)-- the only thing that isn't an "LoL Surprise" with those throw away toys she heat-seeks to is their $10 price point. Both our favorite grocer and closest Target have very affordable/free drive up Pick up services post-pandemic and I take full advantage of them... Should I be tipping these shoppers? So awkward to know with instructions to keep my windows rolled up. Although some sources claim 50% of grocery is impulse, which would amount to $5K per year, that seems high for us-- possibly because there are things a shopper can find that I would skip if I had a melting down toddler in tow-- taking a number at the deli counter, tracking down some obscure new product in one of the many possible fridge cases, you get the idea. ($1.3K/year)
4. Books. I can be a reader without having shelves groaning under the weight of books and then having to figure out where to donate them when they lose their luster, or where to hide the embarrassing ones when we have intelligentsia company coming over. I've found it is way more satisfying and convenient to constantly have a couple books for me and the remainder of our book allotment for the kid checked out of the library. Maybe once every couple of months, I'll find something the inter-library loan catalog doesn't have, has a 50 patron deep wait list, or was so phenomenal I want a copy to keep for personal reference, but I've gone from a teenager in the heady days of early Amazon buying about a book a week to buying maybe a book a month. ($600+/year)
5. Meat. Full disclosure, our household still consumes, but without me dishing it onto my plate, the overall quantity is reduced. I've been on and off veggie for most of my life. The latest bout started with the slaughterhouse shutdowns and grocery store stock outs during covid and I figured "hey, I don't actually miss this that much, let someone else eat my share." You can completely over-run this savings if you insist on expensive plant-based processed food copy-cat versions of old favorites, weird dietary supplements, etc. but in general, I've found it is easier to start with whole foods that are cheaper and more versatile to combine into varied dishes or serve as sides to carnivorous family members... And those family members were the first to concede that Impossible/Beyond ground beef is as tasty and more convenient than going full carnivore. ($1K/year)
6. Booze. So one of the books splurged on in #4 was Carr's Easy Way to Quit drinking and I haven't quite gone all in on the tee-totaling yet. Something about being plant-based and blanket-declining cocktails makes me feel like my social life would suffer too big a blow. But realizing that my metabolism isn't what it once was, I can't drink like a fish and roll out of bed feeling like a rockstar the next day, I started scaling back. It also helped with eating expensive, not very nutritious snacks, often at restaurant price points and screwing up what could have otherwise been a restorative night of sleep. So I've scaled me back from being a moderate drinker (1 beverage/night) to maybe one beverage a week, if measured in $3 Franziskaners, that works out to... ($1K/year)
7. Mortgage interest. Another debatable one because we could have invested in the market and taken advantage of pretty low interest rates when we bought the house. We also take on a whole lot of maintenance costs which might have been passed on to the landlord if we had been renting, sure. But I can't believe I would have had the discipline to calculate let alone sock away the interest component of our monthly mortgage payment and allocate it expeditiously to performing investments rather than languishing in a no-interest savings account until I got on another personal finance kick and took a hard look at the balances. I also can't believe that we are in a worse spot having discretion over what remodeling and maintenance we can do on our money pit compared to being assured we would lose our entire deposit on an Irvine Company apartment regardless of how careful we were and scrupulously we cleaned and know that we will have to do this (plus the hassle of moving) repeatedly because the rent was going up another 20% every time the lease comes up for renewal... and to not be able to invest in soundproofing in the interim? brutal. Pay off the home loan asap and live with the peace of mind your only big ticket costs are going to be property tax and renovation projects. ($4.7K/year)
8. Bananas. This one is silly, but wow, after buying two tiny trees and setting them up on drip lines or laundry to landscape grey water, it seems that we never want for bananas. In fact, when racks come ripe we are desperate to give away the surplus. Stick a popsicle in them and cover them in chocolate and they seem to be an effective substitute for the $5 pint-sized containers of ice cream I was inhaling in the middle of the night when I was 3 sheets to the wind. OK, sure, there is some physical labor with cutting the stalks down (... cheaper than a gym membership?) and their latex will destroy your favorite clothes; I guess there's no such thing as a free dessert. ($100/year)
9. House cleaners and Cleaning products. Most of the savings here comes from deciding not to re-up the house cleaners biweekly visits during covid. Sure, it means I am spending some of my "daddy daughter play date" time resetting the house and never quite feeling like I was as thorough as a team of experienced people with fresh eyes on our mess would be. But I'm also not breaking things as much and I'm not having to make a plan to take me and the kid and the dogs out of the house to hide from the cleaners for an indeterminate number of hours on a given day. That said, the cleaners were totally worth it in the season of life when we were worried about a rug rat being exposed to lots of lead paint dust and I was already OCD wet mopping daily and sheltering in public places most of the day to reduce her exposure, but she's past that phase and we've encapsulated most of it. As I've gotten in the swing of things with DIY cleaning, gone are the days of specialized window/glass/floor cleaners. My rotation now is almost entirely white vinegar and water. OK, maybe some bar keeper's friend, bleach, Bronner's soap, lysol spray, and mineral oil-wax conditioner for butcher block. And sure, I'm experimenting with brand name solution in the steam vac until I get my sea legs under me and find a diy alternative that won't break the machine. So things could be simpler. But keeping cleaning streamlined reduces the overwhelm and desire to over research (i.e. procrastinate) when it comes to house tidying. I also don't get weird headaches from fragrance in products the "eco-friendly" cleaning team were using--possibly just to signal to me that they had been there? I don't have an under sink storage area overflowing with partially used bottles of stuff that seem to have slightly overlapping domains to intrigue my inquisitive haphazardly-supervised preschooler. Life is good. ($6.5K/year)
10. Makeup. Can't say this one was ever a bank-breaker for me. But the silver lining of finding my aging skin is still prone to breakouts is that I can use very few products on it if I want it to stay clear. Those products are so super basic, they aren't expensive (i.e. vaseline!) But this is a truth I find I need to remind myself of frequently as I notice another age line and wonder if there is just some miracle product I haven't tried that would instantly make me look like I had gotten another 4 hours of sleep and added 10 years to my driver's license birthday. ($1K/year)
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