More reckoning

Monday:
$15 for counselor

Tuesday:
$3.50 for coffee

Wednesday:
nothing

Thursday (it may've been a party day (because, really, what else):
$34: rum & Bailey's
$12: cupcakes
$3: coffee
$15: appt with psychiatrist
$10: treats for class

Friday:
$50: accidental thrift store splurge but oh, *so* good (four new shirts for when I am employed again, a skirt for same theoretical context, pants, two zip-up hoodies for the unemployment, a slip that will turn into a dress when layered with other slips, one pajama-y top, and four small bowls in the design that I like and pick up at thrift stores)
$6: ice cream for dinner party I was invited to

It looks splurgalicious, doesn't it? And it is, obviously, since more than $1 went out most days this week. But it was how the stars aligned to celebrate my birth, fate, uncontrolled, absolve me fellow tightwads, for I have sinned, etc.

I am also in the midst of materialistic cravings made no better by the appeareance of birthday presents. More Target shoes* and perhaps that shelving system from Pier 1, but only if I can spraypaint it a red/orange. A bathing suit top.

* Remember when I told you that you would set up these neuroses, but you would eventually have to make exceptions in order to live, because humans are corporal and have to eat and such? One of these areas, for me, is shoes. I spent the worst of my tightwad years, the decade or so between when I had expendable income of my own and when I started on medication, buying shoes almost exclusively at thrift stores. And then one day the rains of Prozac lifted the haze of neuroses and I decided to spend money on a pair of new shoes (actually, I think it was required because I was to be in a good friend's wedding and thrift stores are not reliable for appropriate shoe choices on demand). But unfortunately, I am not reliably normal in ways either physical or mental and my shoe size had gone from being the smallest carried at most shoe stores to not carried by almost all. And thusly I held my breath when plunging my face into the pool of neuroses in the area of shoes whenever I have come across the few that meet the triumvirate demands of fit, price, and aesthetics.

Perhaps there is a magic of triumvirate of demands for any given purchasing decision. Three that can be considered in any situation; any more, and you might be paralyzed, but any fewer, and you might be a spendthrift. This must be pondered further.

Friday budgeting

Friday:
$5: enchilada (accidentally went out to eat.)
$9: beer at the liquor store

Saturday:
$9: co-op: lunch + juices for Sunday morning mimosas
$7: pizza for early dinner/late lunch (beaches require a lot of lunch)
$11: champagne for mimosas
$8: co-op (again) for refills on garlic and black pepper but most importantly aloe vera, and jojoba oil with tea tree oil and lavendar oil (I am neither lactose tolerant nor sunburn resistant even if I set my mind to it, apparently).

Hmmm. I am not selling myself on me being a tightwad. How about you? I will have to unleash a few more of those hordes. Right now it looks like the biggest expense I have is being corporal. Bodies are expensive. You have to feed them and take care of them and transport them and they still have inbuilt obsolescence.

The budget of the unemployed, continued

Thursday's money is full of grace:
brunch out: $10 (because what's the point of being unemployed if you can't periodically have spontaneous midmorning breakfasts with friends who may've been up too late partying and hence are playing hooky from work?)

For the record, I talked myself out of the less healthy (thank you neuroses!) and more expensive things involving hashed browns in favor of a salad and out of an Arnie Palmer in favor of simple iced tea.

::

Today's tip:
While discussing the healthy avoidance of paralyzing guilt, my older and wiser and probably more fun roommate pointed out that the first step is telling yourself there is no reason to feel guilty and that you don't feel guilty. At first, this is empty rhetoric, your politician self promising your plebeian self that the recession you see? Not happening. Ignore the unemployed friends, the rising costs of basics, that falling stock market. But eventually you are less the creepy liar who's cheating on his wife, and more the aged master from kung fu movies who sets a seemingly impossible challenge that turns out to work. And then, one day, you are your own self-help book, providing good advice and reassurance and reminding yourself to have perspective.

My roommate didn't say it like that because she doesn't obfuscate things or have a sick obsession with twisted analogies. But she did agree that it's also similar to making changes to your diet; initially you crave the unhealthy things you're used to eating, but with time, you honestly begin to prefer the healthy foods over those former favorites.

Which brings us to the actual tip: tell yourself what you like and don't like. Eventually you will be telling the truth. Don't say: oh, I really want that new $5 eyeshadow. Instead say: oh, that $5 eyeshadow is pretty enough, but I think it's about one shade off from the ideal brown for my skin tone (aesthetics) and who knows what chemicals are in it (hypochondria, social justice) and that's a lot of packaging (environment) and I'd rather save that $5 for the perfect eyeshadow because $5 is enough to buy a small nation (tightwad).

The best bit is that the perfect eyeshadow exists only as flickering images in Plato's cave and that itself is a concept so you will never actually encounter it.*

* Best bit here means only in the saving-money sense. It is not the best bit when you are supposed to buy a new eye shadow for whatever reason one has to buy eye shadows and you have so convinced yourself that you don't want the imperfect ones that you are nearly paralyzed by the decision and you are the freak standing in Walgreens holding eighteen potential eye shadows with your face streaked with tears and mascara. Not that I've ever experienced such things.

Anecdotal Evidence Exhibit A

This isn't necessarily evidence, but it is anecdotal. Being as I have recently quit my dayjob, it seems as good a time as any to give free reign to the Neuroses That Be, the hidden urges plaguing my daily life. I'm aiming for a gradual loosening of the apocalyptic hordes of pennypinching thoughts that are ready to crowd my brain; I'm unemployed and thus could do with keeping to a budget and even though this means I become a progressively less pleasant person to be, let alone spend time with, sometimes one needs to let the hordes gallop onto the plains of rational thought.

Enough analogizing?

Monday's expenditures:
grocery store: $46 (I loathe grocery shopping, so this was long overdue (meals were down to the two remaining ingredients) and included 100% recycled toilet paper, frozen veggies, garlic, bulk rice, emergency mac & cheese (emotional emergencies, not food emergencies), milk, dish soap, canned tomatoes, rice cakes, other food, and lots of tea (to decrease desire to go to coffee shops (which also serve tea))). I had finally purchased the Blue Sky Guide a month ago (coupons for local and organic and other happy hippy stuff) so I even had coupons like a bloody adult and I "saved" $10 (i.e. I paid $46 instead of $56 but none of it was going into my savings and therefore was still more than $1, and oh! the pain!).

Tuesday's expense report:
coffee shop: $21 (That makes me look terribly decadent, but I wasn't, I swear! It was just that I had a bagel with extras and two beers during happy hour and two teas and my father stopped by sans wallet so I got him a scone and a lemonade and then I tipped (because not tipping is wrong if you are in the U.S.)).
fast food eatery: $5 (Sometimes after two beers and lots of walking and potato salad, you get a bit hungry for things that have been deep fried in unidentifiable liquified fat.)

Wednesday's outflow of my precious precious money:
counselor: $15 (such a deal for minor sanity!)
gas station: $3 (lemonade and a bag of chips for the beach!)
So far I am blowing through my money like a snow blower blows through snow. Will this continue? But of course not! I couldn't be Tightwad, Daughter of Tightwad, then. The perhaps minor issue is that my savings during my tenure as a member of the 9-5 working class came about sans any budgeting or internal reckoning of money because if I pay attention to what I'm spending at all, I freak out.

I've already let Tightwad win the internal arguments against Desire, Common Sense, and Humanity a couple of times. In the gas station, for example, I went with the less tasty Sun Chips ($1.29) over the baked Cheetos ($3.79) though if it had been the baked sour cream and cheddar ruffled chips, Desire would've laid the smack down. At the coffee shop, I abstained from having additional food. I (forgive me, children of Earth, for I have sinned against the environment) asked my brother to help me install my window air conditioner in my room in order to lessen the pull of the coffee shops (I swear I will be judicious in its use, though I am not pregnant or old or in ill health and have no excuse for it (absolve me! absolve me!)).

Other things that I do for either environmental, health, or social justice reasons that don't hurt the Tightwad Revolution:
1. Reuse dental floss (it comes in too much non-recyclable plastic packaging, even when you get the largest roll they sell). I tried using shorter lengths for a while, but I have trouble if I can't wrap it around my fingers.
2. Avoid meat. I used to call myself a vegetarian until it was pointed out that if someone handed me a pork eggroll and I ate it, I couldn't really do that in good faith. So now I am either a fallen-away vegetarian, a lazy vegetarian, a freegan (you buy it, I eat it), or a don't ask don't tell vegetarian. Although honestly, most meat has a texture I find unappealing. And it's expensive.
3. Buy frozen veggies and fruits instead of fresh unless I know I'm going to use them; I hate wasting food, esp. expensive food, esp. food that I am lucky to have because it's so tasty and healthy and wonderful. Frozen veggies are also an easy and relatively cheap ($3/bag) thing to throw in with something fatty and bulky (ramen? brown rice with oil?) to call a meal.
4. Make my own yogurt. Individual containers that cannot be recycled in this town: $0.70 usually. A half-gallon of happy cow pasture milk which makes about nine-ten servings of yogurt: $3.50. Plus unsweetened yogurt makes an excellent substitute for many things for the tightwad who hates grocery shopping. Try it in place of sour cream! (Only not on burritos; that is wrong!)

Extreme Ethical Rigidity expanded

Extreme Ethical Rigidity (EER) might be your modus operandi, but you cannot rely solely on one die-hard or party-line stance. You must, as all sorts of old sayings go, diversify your portfolio and divide your eggs among many baskets. Otherwise it's too easy to reach a conclusion that a purchase is acceptable and then -- whooosh! -- it's your money leaving you.

The opportunities for EER are all around us. Key to these is a) the notion that there is a a real and immutable Good, b) human knowledge is fallible, c) issues are impossibly complex, and d) one wrong step, one bad shampoo choice, could doom an entire species to extinction and your mother to slavery and cause the return of Brutalist architecture.

Shampoo's a good example. If you can manage to sufficiently freak out about shampoo, and I mean crying in the hair products aisle of Walgreens, then you are well on your way to the life of a tightwad. Bonus points if you leave without purchasing one.

What are the issues that come up with shampoo?
1. Ingredients: Are they known or suspected carcinogens? Do they cause breast growth in prepubescent children (lavendar)? Is the run-off safe for waterways? Can you use the grey water after you shower for your garden (note that you need not consider the likelihood of doing this, nor even if you have a garden)? Are the ingredients local? Are any of them endangered? What are the harvesting techniques? Are you allergic/will you break out in a rash? Does it smell good? Is it manufactured for your hair type? Are the ingredients manufactured? Organic? Free range? Vegetarian?
2. Manufacturer: How are their workers treated? Do they offer a living wage? Benefits? Do they support good graphic design? How's the lay-out? Who's the parent company? What are their values? Are they operating with transparency? Where are they located? Was is the discrepancy between the wages of the highest and lowest paid workers? How do they source their ingredients? What is the toxicity of their manufacturing process? How green is their headquarters? What is their creative process?
3. Packaging: Does it recycle? Is it made out of recycled material? What kind of energy goes into producing/recycling the product? How efficient is the design for transportation and manufacture? How pretty? Can it be reused for other things? Will you reuse it for other things?
4. Store: How much do they pay their workers? Benefits? How are workers treated? What is their commitment to the neighborhood/community in which they're located? Where do they source products from? What is their mission? Their values? What kind of building are they in? How is the energy they use produced? Do they run their air conditioning too cold and keep the doors open? Do they practice conservation? Are they pedestrian-oriented or do they pander to car-culture? If they have a parking lot, what have they done to minimize runoff? Is the building new or old? What is their footprint? How much waste do they produce?
5: Cost: Is it over $1? Then put it back.

See how easy this is? You've just avoided most purchases!

Tip 3: Learn to Worry

As a future tightwad, worry is your best friend. It provides a host of issues that will encourage saving, both directly and indirectly related to your finances. It's best to keep your worries all firmly entrenched within the realm of realism; a fear of monsters in your coin purse might work briefly, but it also invites needed and easy therapy as well as ridicule.

Some favorites:
Hypochondria. This one ought to be in every tightwad's repertoire. This can limit where you live, what you eat, what you wear, what you do, where you work, etc. Be warned, though, that it can backfire if not held at bay by other tightwad tendencies.

Unemployment. A great worry for those who are both employed (there is the possibility!) and unemployed (it's far too real!).

Anthropogenic global climate change. Lots of causes. Worldwide. Scientifically agreed upon. Devastating human and environmental potential. Scary. Scary. Terror.

Note 1: All of these have a component of personal responsibility. Asteroid is not on the list for a reason.

Note 2: An important complementary lesson to learning worry is learning to extrapolate. If you feel a twinge, not quite a pain, on your head, label it a brain tumour. If rationality creeps in, google "brain tumour" and "mad cow disease."

Tip 2: Create a Pyramid of Purchase Pondering

For our next money-saving trick, throw your rational mind out the window. We're going to create a hierarchy of purchases. You obviously don't need to spend as long pondering and comparison shopping for that stale penny bubblegum at the hardware store as you do for your first $100,000 condo.

Here's how it goes:
< $1: Minor purchase. Don't cry when you hand over the money.

$1-$10: Major purchase. Most people in the world live on this much money for an entire month. Or something. There are statistics showing that if you have access to seeing this, you are rich. Therefore, you have a responsibility to spend appropriately.

$10-$20: Major major purchase. Your grandparents sold their house for this much during the Depression.

$20-$100: Majorly major major purchase. This is countless immunization shots and political regime overthrows and monthly salaries for people working much harder than you are.

>$100: Circuit frying purchase. You'll need therapy for this one. How did you end up so lucky as to be able to even consider this purchase in your lifetime? Why were you born into life with things that cost over $100 and blogs and internet access and a vote while other people eat dirt and watch their children die of preventable illnesses? Does this $100 purchase correctly reflect your values and the values of those who could be bought and sold with it? Does it protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Will it make you happy? Did the people producing the good sing songs while they made it? Will it last? Will it draw baths for you, but not in a way that hearkens back to your invisible role in social inequalities in the world?

** There may be loopholes in here, as they are sometimes necessary for survival. But following this guide as-is will be a good start to lining your bank account with big bills.

Tip 1: Develop Neuroses

I've been thinking lately about what makes it so that I can save over $10,000 in a year while spending as recklessly as I ever have in my life. I've got some natural advantages, like no debt from college, but most of the advantages come back to choices I've made about money. And most of those choices, I believe, go back to genetics. I am Tightwad, progeny of Tightwad & Spendthrift.

Tightwaddery is not a particularly socially acceptable condition. Who wants to go out with the cheapskate who counts pennies and turns down invitations to nice restaurants? Not many, and probably even fewer decent folk. But luckily the genetic line of tightwaddery I have comes hand in hand with other charming mental traits such as extreme ethical rigidity.

(If you want to save money, cheer for extreme ethical rigidity! It is your best friend! And, once employed appropriately, your only friend!)

For you, genetically unlucky person, Extreme Ethical Rigidity (EER) will need to be learned. I'll offer tips.

1. Develop an ethical framework. What are your values? Which of society's values do you embrace?

2. Put every decision into your ethical framework and expect perfection.

3. Save money!


Perhaps a practical, real-life example would help:
1. The general American cliched values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are a good starting point. You can do whatever you want and buy whatever you want so long as you don't go messing around with others' rights to those three.

2. You decide to get a new wallet. You can't buy wallets made in most countries of the world, because you are unsure of the labor standards under which they were produced. Vinyl's out, because its production is too toxic. Leather's out, because of livestock isn't an efficient use of land and you're not sure the animal was killed humanely. If you find yourself getting close to making a purchase, remember that your money is also how you communicate what you value. You might want to support a locally-owned business that pays a living wage to its employees and sources its materials in a sustainable way.

3. Ha! Good luck, sucker! Put that money straight into the bank instead of worrying about finding a wallet to carry it around in.

To begin

What this blog will be:
A way for you to learn the valuable financial lessons of those DSM-IV certified issues I bring to the table of life.

A way for me to share the joys and pitfalls of tightwaddery, ethical rigidity, and paralyzing indecisiveness with the vast reaches of the internet.

What this blog will not be:
Responsible for your mental issues, should you have any.

Responsible for the death of your social life should you take the suggestions herein to heart.

Why this blog's existence is justfiable:
Because you really do want to know how to be such a tightwad that you can save 1/3 of your income even when living like a spendthrift.

Because that which hurts us and makes us miserable ought to be laughed at.

About me:
I'm a twenty-something girl living in the urban Midwest. I've been a tightwad shopaholic for about as long as I can remember. While this hasn't always been good for my social life (who really wants to hang out with the teenager who won't go to movies and would prefer that a trip to the mall end without any money changing hands), it's allowed me to tender my resignation to try to find a job I love during an economic recession.

In the year and a half that I held the entry-level job, I saved up over $10,000 dollars while living as high on the hog as I ever had in my life. This gives me a window of approximately ten months to either make it or find a lovely group home for adults. Here are the secrets of a disturbed mind.

Disclaimer:
Therapy is very wonderful. Medication also helps. And friends.