I love the jeans I'm wearing. I actually wear them almost four days a week. Chances are that if you see me, I'm wearing these jeans. They're my only pair. When I bought them, I very gladly put down my $200 cash and left the store with a smile. The jeans I had before them cost the same, and I wore them until they got holes in them, and then I got those patched up, and then the patches got holes in them and the hem came out and I decided to move on.

A lot of personal finance advice I read says that $200 is entirely too much to spend on jeans, no matter their longevity. The problem here is that I love these jeans. I feel confident in them. It sounds weird to me, but having jeans that fit this well have become a value of mine. The jeans aren't the point though. Chances are, we all have something we buy that maybe costs more than it should, or at least more than it could, be it wine, fitness, clothing, makeup, electronics, or pure-bred cats. My goal is to spend on the things I care about, and ferociously save on the things I don't.

I practice the art of conscious spending.

How much should you spend on a wedding? Well, that depends on who you're asking, I suppose. As I'm sure most of you are aware, the personal finance blogosphere tends to be divided into two main camps: those that are focused on investments and entrepreneurship and those that are focused on frugality.

In my experience, however, the entrepreneurship camp is pretty live-and-let-live. The whole “cut everything you don't care about so you can spend whatever you'd like on the things you do care about” school of thought. When you think about it, this makes sense for a few reasons.

• We all have different skill sets to be utilized in our respective side hustles.
• Different skills mean different pricing schemes.
• We all have different work and family situations that we're fitting said side hustles in around.
• We all care about spending our money on different things, and those things cost different amounts and reflect our tastes and values.

Long story short, what this means is that sometimes it's difficult to talk about investment and entrepreneurial issues in a way that applies to everyone.

We all have our ways of destressing after a long day. One of my weirdest and most beloved post-work, take-a-load-off strategies has always been cruising the aisles of gourmet grocery stores just to look at packaging. Give me an aisle of fancily bottled extra virgin olive oil, and I'll need at least an hour. Nothing is more calming to me than fancy fonts on fancy jars of fancy imported foods.

I don't even need to buy anything. Often I just stroll around, try a sample of pickled figs, and continue my stroll home. Sometimes though, I'll splurge on a $3 glass bottle of spring water from some promised fountain-of-youth in Italy. This, to me, is the quintessential quandary of wants vs. needs: I need to drink water, but I don't need it to come from a hydro-spa in Lurisia.

What's a Want? What's a Need?

There were a lot of comments in my last article about spontaneous spending as to how to determine wants and needs when budgeting according to the Balanced Money Formula in Warren and Tyagi's All Your Worth. Whether you use their formula or not, figuring out the essentials of your budget is important. For those of you just tuning in, the balanced money formula says that 50% of your income should go toward needs, 30% to wants, and 20% into savings. I think this comment exemplifies some of the confusion:

This is an article by Justin Reames, who blogs at The Family Finances.

Growing up, I remember watching shows like "Lassie" and movies like "Old Yeller" and "Where the Red Fern Grows". These were old movies when I was a kid, but they were free to rent from the library, so we watched more than our fair share of old movies.

Because of those shows, I always thought it would have been nice to have a dog. The closest thing we had to a family pet was a turtle that my grandfather and I caught on a fishing trip. I had to keep it outside in a small tub, and after a week or two he ended up missing. Fast forward to adulthood. After buying our house in the fall of 2008, we soon decided to get a dog.

Most of us struggle with some psychological aspect of money that can impede our savings. Whether it be the lure of clothing stores, nights out with friends, or stocking a top-shelf liquor cabinet, there tends to be one thing or another that creeps from our wants category into our needs. I've never been a compulsive shopper and always preferred voluntary simplicity, both in the kitchen and in my closet. This means that for most of my young adult life, I had good control of my finances.

Then I Started Dating…

Dating quickly made gift giving my Achilles heel. As with other debt-inducing habits, it seemed harmless at first. Here are some things I started doing, not realizing how much money I was shelling out:

• I never liked to show up at my girlfriend's apartment empty handed so I always had her favorite Snapple or a magazine for her in hand. (Six bucks, just to say hello.)
• I always wanted to pick up the check, even when we were out with a friend or two. (Could be upwards of $100, just to show I cared.)
• I brought expensive bottles of wine to dinner parties, not to show off, but just to enjoy with everyone, even if I was just as happy with $7 bottle myself. ($25 to try to find community.)
• I was sent to the store to get simple baking supplies, but instead of getting the normal vanilla extract, I would get the fancy packaged one for twice the price. Take that philosophy down the entire list of supplies and I'd racked up a pretty hefty bill. ($50 extra just so we could feel high society together.)

It was never about seeming rich to my friends or girlfriend. I took pride in my penny pinching in every other aspect of my life. I honestly thought it was about generosity and showing affection, nothing more. Continue reading...

This article written by Corinne is part of the "reader stories" feature at Get Rich Slowly. Some stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success or failure. These stories feature folks with all levels of financial maturity and income.

At my previous job, I was paid on a monthly basis. I loved it. I got all my money for the month upfront, so it didn't matter when I scheduled automatic savings or investment transfers.

When I moved to a job that was on a bi-weekly payroll schedule, I had to make sure the transfers were split across the month so I didn't inadvertently empty my checking account! I was grumpy about it at first, but I've come to discover a wonderful secret about getting paid bi-weekly: If you're on a biweekly payroll schedule, you're getting a couple of "bonus" pay checks every year! Yes, that's right. Bonus checks. Let me explain.

Over the past few months, I've occasionally used the "Ask the Readers" feature at Get Rich Slowly to poll people about their budgets and spending habits. So far, I've asked folks to share their spending on food, clothes, gifts, and health insurance. Now I want to look at a bigger item in your budget — probably the biggest. Let's talk about how much you spend on housing.

More than other expenses, your housing costs are influenced by where you live. Some parts of the country — and some parts of the world — are much cheaper to buy a home or to rent an apartment. It's cheaper to live in Boise, Idaho, for instance, than to live in New York City. Generally, however, there are reasons for these price disparities. Most people are willing to pay more to live in New York than in Boise, and that drives prices higher. It's a trade-off.

I'm a firm believer in the Balanced Money Formula, which says that if you pay too much for housing, you'll have less to spend on other wants and needs, and you'll always feel pinched, as if you can't afford anything. On the other hand, if you limit your housing expense to below 25% of your take-home pay, you should have lots of breathing room.

Hey, average American, what are you planning to do with the tax refund you are about to receive? So let's start with useful ideas for spending your tax refund for those in the first stage of personal finance and work our way up to those who are less pinched. Depending on which stage of personal finance describes your current financial situation, your tax refund can help you along if you plan carefully.

Before we go there, though, why are you getting a refund in the first place?

This article was written by freelance writer Jessica Ward.

For three years, I've been patting myself on the back. The household expenses remain the same every month, and we're getting out of debt. In spite of increases in costs, we've found efficiencies and made room. But, as they say, after pride comes the fall. I discovered this month that we're actually making less progress every month now than when we first started making monthly budgets!

Initially I thought this was a short-term trend, but when I looked back a little farther in the old budgets file, I discovered that we've really been on this path since day one. We have succumbed to “lifestyle creep.” Subtle upticks in our family's expenses that don't necessarily fall into line with real costs of living.

How do you know what it costs to be you? That's my question for the day, dear GRS reader.

I've come a bit full-circle in what I think is most important when it comes to financial success. When I was a young, low-paid teacher, I focused on penny-pinching and budgeting. As I got older, I spent more time on investments. Now, I'm coming back to the importance of keeping tabs on expenses. Perhaps it's because investing hasn't been as rewarding over the past several years. Perhaps it's because it seems like financial security seems a bit more precarious these days. Maybe it's because the way I think about the whole kit-and-kaboodle — whether you call it budgeting, or cash-flow management, or a spending plan — a bit differently.

After I left teaching, I became a financial adviser with one of those big-name, full-service brokerages. During our three weeks of training in the Big Apple, we never learned about budgeting — it never even came up. Neither did debt management, financial calculations, or how to choose the right investment account. We only learned about investing (sorta), how to find clients with lots of money, and how to sell, sell, sell.