Nearly every single week Mr. Ex comes up with new things he wants to buy. He finds electronics and gadgets of all proportion that he loves, ergo thinks he needs and wants, and it’s almost become a pattern, where he can literally go a certain amount of time before expressing a new “want,” like clockwork. He disguises it in the form of need first, and then after talking with me realizes it is a want…however therein lies the problem. He is a spendthrift and I am a cheapskate. It has been a constant tug of war for our entire lives together. I am not sure why I thought he would “outgrow” his money spending ways by living with a tightwad, but sadly it went just the opposite. He felt the need to do various things to get money to then buy things that he hid from me. Not sure which came first, the gambling addiction or the yearning to buy things, but he said he could never get enough of the feeling of having rolls of money in his pocket (unbeknownst to me,) and just buy “whatever he wanted.”
Since he has started on his road to recovery he says he has a different feeling about money in his pocket, doesn’t need it so much. However, his desire to buy those gadgets has not waned, and his spending habits have been a major source of contention for us and through the years have thrown us into separate corners. When he “came clean” he turned the finances completely over to me, which is ironic as he always had me manage the finances before, but only the ones I knew about…which is a little more than upsetting. But for our entire lives together he has worked hard to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table, clothes on our backs, and the bills paid. It is only in the past few years that his secret life of spending got out of control enough that…well…let’s just say it’s been life-changing, and now I’m more frugal than ever.
The recent financial “transparency,” combined with a continued perpetual desire to make new and usually expensive purchases, upgrades, and acquisitions versus prudent and tactical spending has made me seriously reflect on the thrill of spend—or not—thriftiness.
I’m a huge bargain hunter, I get a thrill out of getting something for an amazingly low price. I look for the best deals when money is spent on anything, everything, anywhere, anytime, first being sure it is needed not wanted, and that I am getting the most bang for the buck. I outlet shop, I use coupons at the grocery, I won’t pay full retail for anything. I won’t go out to dinner without figuring out a way we can squeeze the most out of our dollars, including splitting meals (hey, saves calories too.) I will wait years for something to go out of fashion to buy it later at its lowest price on the deepest clearance rack. In fact it is safe to say that I only buy things on sale. I constantly try to figure out ways to lower our budget, cut here, snip there, finagle this, frugal that…I have limits on what I think is too much to spend.
Every year Mr. Ex gets offered tickets to NFL games, which by the way go for approximately $170/seat, and every year I nix it because every season he also gets to go at least once for free. He has a friend who has season tickets who always takes him on the coldest, snowiest day in early January, or he might get invited to go from an “office-sales-customer perk.” I know those opportunities role around and I’m too cheap not to wait.
Recently I read an article from a popular women’s magazine that was about the top 10 things that women don’t tell men. One of them was they do not tell the men how much they really spend on things, and they actually say they paid 20% less than they did. I don’t do that because I’m too cheap to pay the real price and am proud when I get something for way way less than it would have/could have cost. I wait for ultra-clearance and then brag about it.
I’m not strictly generic, there oftentimes is a difference, and I prefer to not compromise brand in some cases. Most of the time I’d rather get the “real” brand on major clearance. I’m not into labels, but there’s something about getting the label for less than the generic brand that makes me smile. Actually if you do your research you can find the same manufacturer of different labels and basically get the same stuff for less cost if you don’t care about the label and you probably don’t have to sacrifice quality. But to be truly thrifty do you have to not care about name brands? That is up for debate.
There are a lot of benefits of being mindful of spending, especially in today’s economy. Does that make me thrifty? Maybe not. It’s about saving money. Cheap and on sale is my middle name, and also that of our friend A.
My good friend J is married to A, who epitomizes cheap. (This part is told with love to A from J.) Pack rat by personality, but also by his belief of the necessity of having “it” and having constant debates on the reason to keep things from clothes to broken furniture, A will pull things out of the trash and say maybe I can use that. Even if it’s broken, whatever the cost of the item, he finds ways he can use items for parts or fix them. He says that maybe somebody will want it or will do something with it. Furniture, magnets, doesn’t matter what it is, he keeps it or re-uses it, he still has college textbooks from 35 years ago because he thinks his kids might be able to use them someday! (This is where A and I differ, I recycle out or throw everything away, I keep nothing…I’m the opposite of packrat…what is that? Minimalist?)
A is the recycling king, he goes through the trash, washes it, recycles it. He has pieces of wood sitting in the garage, “good wood” he calls it, from whatever he thinks was made with good wood that he may be able to re-build or re-use as the case may be. There are many times when his family will have thrown things away and later he will go out into the garage and find it. He even eats whatever leftover food is in the house no matter how long it’s been there. “Don’t throw that away, I’ll eat it,” he says.
A will take clothes from anyone, regardless of the style, he will take pretty much anything from anyone if it’s reusable in some way, shape, or form; buys food from the sale rack in the back of the grocery; keeps all to-go ketchup and sauce packets from fast food restaurants for later use. He even hoards napkins. (I do that too-with the napkins.) Nothing makes him happier than getting free moist-towelettes!
My favorite is A’s use of “groupons.” Groupons are when you get a whole group of people to buy a certain amount of food or certain number of meals in one sitting, like a coupon. “Get your Group-on” is a famous slogan in their house.
Fiscally responsible, financially sound, and well, basically frugal…ok, cheap, A embraces his idiosyncrasies about his cheapness and is a good sport about it. He plays along when his family makes fun of him. But they love his quirkiness when it comes to spending, and love his devotion to them in spite of it. If they are low on cash one week, he’ll go without for the kids to buy lunch at school, even if he has to hand them a Groupon to do it.
Which reminds me, the other day I handed my oldest son money and a coupon to buy lunch during his driver’s ed class. He won’t take his lunch (much to my dismay,) because they all go out as a group and buy lunch. He said to me, “Stop being A. I’m not using your groupon, no way.”
All of our kids, both J and A’s and ours were invited to a birthday party, and right before the party I asked J what she got the birthday girl, and she said, “$34 cash…that’s all I had in my wallet.” I am waaay too cheap to do that, I have to find something that was $30 but I got on sale for $15! And cash? Forget it. That’s never on sale.
I guess everybody has their spending limits. Some people are thrifty, some are spendthrifts. I live with one who pays no heed to spending, gets a thrill out of it, and encourages me to spend, when in fact I get my thrill out of not spending and finding a really amazing bargain. Does someone who loves to spend money do this for happiness? What about somebody who doesn’t? Do they not do it for happiness? It’s all in how you look at whatever it is that pleases your penny.
Yin and Yang? Nah. Cha and Ching.
