December was an absolute bloodbath of spending for me, not even considering the Christmas gifts I bought. It all started with a few ill-reasoned purchases of vintage mainframe manuals, which ate a $50 chunk out of my budget, and then progressed to numerous “I’ve wanted this for awhile” items, including a few otherwise very fun but also expensive hockey card box purchases. But then, yes, was Christmas shopping, which I keep telling myself I’ll scale back on but I never do, and as we all got our lists out late this year, the USPS was slammed, so I paid the extra to ship elsewhere. Total shipping was somewhere between $80-100. Oof.
Strangely enough, though, I was actually below my budget on food ($400/month), and it wasn’t even hard, so that’s a huge win.
I’ve been thinking to myself…what are some principles for budgeting? Everybody has their weaknesses, and I’ve always found common budget “tips” to be fairly annoying, but surely there is some kind of guidance that might apply across the board?
Here are a few ideas I came up with:
- Don’t Spend Money on Things You Don’t Get Value From
- The clearest principle I can think of is to not spend money on things you don’t get value from. Last month, I finally cancelled my stupid gym membership, because I hate gyms and I always will. They say the best exercise is the exercise you will actually do, and I don’t need any motivation to want to take a walk outside or go hiking or snowshoeing. It’s not that jogging on a treadmill doesn’t have some beneficial effects, it’s that I could never bring myself to do it consistently, because it sucks. I signed up in late 2019 (yeah), and then wasn’t able to cancel during 2020 because I was under contract. Great. But even after that, I just kept paying, maybe getting into it for a bit ever couple of months before putting if off, and even my training for Nepal in 2022 was almost exclusively local hiking and not the gym, so although I could certainly have done better, it turns out the gym is not the place for me. I’m done. Now, it only saves $30 per month, but getting back to the principle, this was $30 thrown out the door every month, because it was literally being wasted, as I wasn’t even using the product I was paying to access. Fundamentally, this is even worse than spending money on these stupid breakfast energy drinks, because at the least the drinks taste good, and I derive some value from the experience of drinking them. So yes, it was “ONLY” $30, but it was (most months) a complete waste, so yeah, don’t pay for things you don’t get value from.
- Avoid Spending Money on Things That Actively Hurt You
- This is where the injunction begins to avoid things like energy drinks, things we pretty safely know are bad for you. I’ve been using these old NHS forms to track intake, exercise, and calories each day based on weekly increments, and, say what you want about counting calories, when I eat less I lose weight, without fail, and it has always been this way. A bad habit I picked up in 2020 was frequently getting ice cream pints throughout the week, and although I didn’t regain a ton of weight quickly the way many did, the collective downgrade in my eating habits paved the way for me to gain almost 15 pounds over the next few years. I scaled this back dramatically this past year, but it became my Sunday treat, until I realized how impossible it often makes it to eat less than 2500 calories total. I was also shocked yesterday how a trip to Mickey D’s was roughly two meals’ worth of calories, and the otherwise clean foods I ate for breakfast and dinner weren’t able to overcome it, leading to a day of about 2800 calories. And, I would say, the research is pretty clear that ultra-processed foods like fast food are not good for you. So that was roughly $9 out the door, and the ice creams are usually $6, and that shit will absolutely add up. It’s not to say you can never treat yourself, but it’s no good paying money to put bad things into your body, even if they may taste good in the moment. This is honestly where the concept of “value” gets really tricky, but I will leave it here for today, though it is worth noting that the injunction is to “avoid” spending money on these things, as I think the best take away is to not make a habit of this sort of thing.
- Be Cautious Spending Money on New (Different) Things
- I’m hesitant to write this because I otherwise think that trying new things can be good for you, but it can be really difficult to gauge how far your interest is going to carry you. I’ve had friends spend tons of money to get into a new hobby, just to burn out or lose interest after a brief while. However, as a more clear example, I was at the grocery store this morning and discovered a new white chocolate spread that looked really good. I almost grabbed it except my brain actually kicked in and checked the price this time, to find that it was $14. Holy crap! I checked the ingredients and the first was some sort of sugar alternative that is not technically sugar but may as well be, and they proudly proclaimed “no sugar!” on the container. A rule of thumb is that anything purporting to be a chocolate spread of any kind is likely 50% sugar, so I could smell the lie pretty clearly. Moreover, at the end of the list was my beloved enemy “natural flavors”. If I’m paying that much money, it should be pure organic cream from Shangri La, no chemicals added, but the word “natural flavors” is one of the worst lies in the industry. And don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of foods I eat that have them – they are very difficult to avoid – but it turns out that “trying something new” in this case would actually have been a case of spending a lot of money to violate #2. Those sorts of purchases can really sink a budget if you are doing them too often, and I decided that this time, it really wasn’t worth it.
At this point in time, that’s honestly all I have as far as extrapolating some core principles. I finally stopped being lazy and adjusted my income for the Colorado version of Obama-Care, and it turns out that doing so should save me almost $140 per month on health insurance, which is a huge punch in the gut when I consider how much that could have saved me over the past two years, if I just hadn’t been too lazy to figure out how to adjust the figures. In my defense, I kept thinking I was going to move, I despise that sort of administrative paperwork, and I had no idea the drop in income would give me such a huge subsidy. There are no doubt many principles out there, but they apply to specific situations and are less generalizable.
Anyway, these are just a few thoughts that may contribute to your arsenal of tools.