[...] re-evaluated my spending. I paid particular attention to recurring expenses. (I cut back to basic cable, for example, which [...]

We may also need to consider of optimizing the length of enjoyment and benefit of a product. If we want to be frugal, we should not purchase a product just because ours is rather old or doesn’t have the new features.

Colin Joss
East Lothian, Haddington
United Kingdom

[...] news, JD is not a chain-smoking lush.  Okay, I mostly just wanted to lead with that sentence. (Read it at Get Rich [...]

But we have to separate this from simply living cheap, because with frugality we can get healthier mean like eat more vegetables or even eat non-pesticide vegetables.. Also free from clutters.. and so on..

I agree that joy is a legitimate and good thing for people to pursue, and being miserable just to have money in the bank is overdoing it. Yet I also think that if we want to live in a better world than the one we currently inhabit, we need to think of other people’s joy as well, and to think of joy in a more long-term way. Some of the things I enjoy are bad for the environment. Some of them undermine workers rights. Some of them require the pain and death of other living creatures.

I don’t think that being ascetic is necessarily a virtue. I just would like to see more understanding and action (in my own life too) that our money choices are more complicated than “save it” or “spend it on whatever brings you pleasure.”

To Lorraine–It sounds like you are making great strides toward being both responsible and ethical with your money. I agree that often the frugal choice is also the ethical choice (like riding a scooter or a bike instead of a car when possible). But sometimes it isn’t. Local organic veggies are expensive where I live, and it’s hard for me to talk myself into buying them, although they would also be better for my health!

This is a point that many of the personal finance bloggers I’ve seen overlook far too often. In fact, I tend to detect a decidedly ascetic undertone, almost to the point of religion, in most of the personal finance blogs I have seen. It’s almost as if they hate happineess. Yeah, going into debt for pleasure isn’t terribly smart, but it’s worse to forego all pleasure. If one has no pleasure in one’s life, what’s the point in living?

You mention that you bought some of your books with personal money when you should have (legitimately) used the business account. Expense the damn things and get your money back!

[...] weekend. If you’re looking for a great example of tracking discretionary spending, check out this post by JD at [...]

Thanks, by the way, for sharing the URLs for the two band’s. I love finding new artists to listen to.

I looked on your spending. I need to remind you on one thing. I usually tend to increase my meal & entertainment costs whenever I am putting high pressure in lowering my overall spending while increasing income.

Colin Joss
East Lothian, Haddington
United Kingdom

Ruth, you make some very good points there, and now I think about it – you are right – the green/ethical side of life is overlooked on a lot of the finance blogs. I have found the simple living/frugal type genre a lot better for the concerns you speak of.

I am very guilty of just what you emphasise and have to be honest and say the need for my young family to make the most of our money does not extend to environmental concerns as yet. I have to say though that as a by-product of living frugally, we have almost halved our electricity expenses and I would say we are buying generic goods which have so much less packaging so are probably throwing away 1/5 of the rubbish we used to. In our march towards living frugally we have started composting, and are starting a garden. I buy my fruit and vegies at the local market more for price but again, I am buying mostly organic and supporting local growers almostly accidentally. By buying secondhand clothes/goods etc, we are saving money AND keeping things from being landfill. By shunning consumerism as much as we are able, we also send our small message every time we refuse to buy Barbie or Gucci or McDonalds. I guess what I’m trying to say is that by virtue of living more carefully and moving towards frugality, there is probably a bit shift towards those ehtical concerns as a by-product.

And I have to say that comments such as yours make people like me sit up and think harder about my decisions. Thankyou Ruth.

Lorraine (the Accidental Greenie!)

I do understand that people take one step at a time, and asking too much too soon makes people throw in the towel. So this isn’t a finger-wagging comment. I’m just sharing a discomfort I have with most personal finance blogs–the ethical component of how our spending effects others and the environment is usually an afterthought, if there at all.

Why should you still read my blog about money? Because I also invest over $1,000 a month and that money, if invested wisely, will make me a wealthy man one day. It is GET RICH SLOWLY and that is what J.D. and his readers and myself are all about. Lets lead a balanced life and have some fun. wthell obviously doesn’t get it; it’s his loss.

also, the decemberists make me wet myself, they’re so good.

I need to crunch some numbers and specifics, this post is great.

JD:
Thanks for sharing your numbers with us. Sorry you have to deal with ridiculous personal attacks from nasty people.

In the past couple of years, when I was starting my new career, a large proportion of my discretionary spending went towards clothes and shoes. I decided that my clothing/shoe budget for 2008 would be $0 and I would use what I saved to pay off my law school student loan early. This took a huge leap of faith for me because I love to buy clothes and shoes! I decided to be radical on this one category because I knew I did not really NEED more clothing. Now that I’ve made the decision, I am really excited about it. I know it will be hard for me to stick to my decision, but it will be huge victory if I can do it. Have you considered doing something like that with one of your discretionary categories?

You don’t HAVE to live with one car if you are able to have two. And, you don’t have to invest.

J.D.’s out of debt. Enough said. The point is to inspire you to find your own way…so go do it and don’t point fingers.

While we are working towards a better and more detailed budget, I like the idea of looking at
income – living expenses – saving/investing = discretionary spending.
For example, if you earn $100,000 and $30,000 goes to living expenses (house, utilities, insurance, transport, groceries) could you put $50,000 into savings/investing/paying off debt and then the remainder, $20,000, goes to discretionary spending?
Could you live on 1/2 of your income? Or if you are a 2 income family, can you live on 1 income and bank the 2nd income?

Thanks, by the way, for sharing the URLs for the two band’s. I love finding new artists to listen to.

We emphasized living for today only in contrast to wthell’s claims of moral superiority through self-denial. Living below your means is a mantra (and a way of life) in this community, but it’s important that people understand that LBYM does not have to mean living like a monk. I’m afraid that people will read posts like wthell’s and be discouraged by the standard that is being set. People aren’t dumb — when presented with an all-or-nothing choice between saving and actually living, they will choose the only rational choice, which is living.

The point of this blog is to get rich SLOWLY. Meaning — sanely, in a manner that doesn’t defy living in the present. It also reminds us that getting RICH isn’t simply a matter of MONEY, rich is more than a bank balance.

Look — JD just paid off all his debt except for his mortgage. He did it by putting a priority on paying off the debt. Now, it’s true, he wasn’t doing it with Dave Ramsey-style gazelle intensity looking at his discretionary spending, but what JD isn’t telling us is how much income went towards debt repayment. I suspect if you compared the numbers side by side, his debt repayment would far exceed his discretionary spending.

Now — personally I’d like to think my numbers came in lower than JD’s. Realistically, I know they wouldn’t. I have learned after a couple of years of attempting to practice Dave Ramsey-style gazelle intensity that I have a personal limit to how much I can forgo. That doesn’t equate to not making sacrifices — and JD also never said he wasn’t making sacrifices. In fact — THE POINT he was making was that he’d made sacrifices and lowered the money he was spending in these categories.

I can go for a few months of really pouring on the debt repayment and denying myself a few simple pleasures, but the longer I go, the nastier a spending binge I end up having at some point. (NOTE: I’m not talking thousands of re-debting — its usually hundreds though. If I deny myself my short list of small “rewards”, I just reach a point where I can’t stop myself from spending indiscriminately in some store without reason. Usually it’s a bookstore and I walk out with a few hundred dollars of books I really could live without, and then I start spending it up at restaurants twice a day until I get a grip on myself.)

So rather than do that, I allow myself a certain measure of “unnecessary” discretionary spending. A few times a week I go to a coffee shop (where I spend a whopping $1.77 on a cup of the house coffee, which I like better than the fancy drinks. The point is, it’s an outing.)

I allow myself to eat out at lunch rather than taking a lunch — I don’t really care for brown-bag lunches so if I take my lunch 25% of the time and go out 75% of the time I consider that ok. I also go out to a restaurant twice on most weekends, usually for a less expensive lunch or breakfast.

When a movie comes out that I want to see, I go see it (trust me, this is rare — I think most of the movies coming out lately are garbage).

I go out for a splurgy high tea for my birthday (the ultimate in unnecessary spending is $30 for somebody to give you all the tea, cookies, and hors d’ouerves you can eat), a spa experience and a play. I’d LOVE to go to the symphony and theater more often — not to mention I’d go to the spa once a week if I could justify the expense — but I limit to once a year.

And, YES — I still spend money in bookstores. I try to keep it at $60 or less each month. I know I could go to the library or do the used book thing — frankly neither of those options replace the joy of reading a crisp, clean new book. So I compromise. I use the library part of the time and I buy new books. I’ve never had the comic book bug, but I have a list of DVDs I want to own so periodically I buy one of those to build my private collection.

I know there are other people in other countries who don’t have the discretionary spending power Americans have. Frankly, it doesn’t change that fact for them if *I* were to try to emulate their spending power. It doesn’t change their situation if I forego because I feel guilty on their behalf. That’s not the point of trying to be frugal.

But enough ranting from me.

I looked into my account statements and found the following for the period between Oct 2006 and Oct 2007.

Total spending on “personal wants”: $4349

This includes a $1499 alu-carbon bike which I have estimated saving about $600 on gas and wear and tear on the car because I use it to commute. (Of course that’s a cash flow I don’t see because it is mainly an accrued cash flow).

There is $950 on a certification and about $250-300 on textbooks to go with other continuing education. I put this under entertainment since it is not strictly needed and because it would be hard to associate it with a future cash flow, but you never know.

This leaves about $1600. I know that about $800 of that went to a full set of hockey gear since I just started playing in an outdoor league. Add about $300 in playing fees and we get a seriously expensive hobby. The rest of the money went to two very nice tailor fitted suits.

It’s a good thing that most of these were one time expenses associated with start up costs from moving to a new place.

As for comic books, two friends and I “partner” up— each of us buys a title we are following, and we pass them around. maybe the morals of this are questionable, but we get to donate directly to the artists— we’ve been able to commission artwork with our savings!— and to the causes the artists and publishers support. We’ve also generated considerable buzz for them, because we discuss the titles on a bulletin board we share.

Hm… we should do potlucks…

My discretionary spending used to make up 30% (or more of my income). That was crazy. Now it’s down in that 5-10% range…

I’m enjoying this discussion a lot : )

I can’t even think of a reply to wthell. what you are saying is so asinine I don’t even know where to start. I hope that huge bank account your amassing is a real comfort to you when you realize how much of your life you missed living.

This has the led to the theory that Cat Ladies (and Cat Gentlemen) are infected by the parasite, explaining their infatuation with puddy tats.

Fifty cents a day for four cats is not bad! Especially if you’re factoring in the vet bills. The other day at my blog I calculated that I’ve spent something over $18,000 on my twelve-year-old German shepherd, all told.

She did chase off a prowler once, but since I don’t own 18 grand worth worth of stealable goods, it’s probably not an even deal.