Just as with my food budget, I give myself $400 every month for discretionary spending, which consists of everything from clothes, to books, to paper towels, to restaurants. Things like annual vehicle registration, gifts for my nieces, and expensive car parts are outside of this budget, but I’m still frustrated how I exceed this $400 every month. Let’s look at a few stupid ways I spend this money.
Last week, I decided to try 7 days of semi-“deprivation” by setting a few ground rules for one week: all energy drinks must be walked for [I have to buy them from the convenience store a 15-minute walk from here], no Amazon orders, no new books, lunch only with friends or at Mickey-D’s, and no groceries except bananas. I already had a lot of food on hand, so it made sense to sober up for a week and eat what I had, and I was also hoping to cut down on things like books, which tend to eat a huge part of my budget. Considering $400 per month translates to about $100 per week, a $40 book can eat almost half of the weekly budget, and I’m full up on books to read, so I decided to push back against myself and take a break from buying them.
Now that it’s the 8th, how did I do for the week? Well, not great.
I did not make any Amazon purchases, and I didn’t buy any books. Except for the other day, I made sure to walk if I wanted a breakfast energy drink (although I did a few times buy two at one stop, which wasn’t against the rules). My lunch was graciously paid for on Sunday, and aside from Mickey-D’s, I avoided restaurants all other days of the week. I did brake my rule on groceries, though, but only for a $6 Asiago cheese wedge and a $7 ice cream pint.
The bad news, though, was that I still managed to piss a lot of money away. I ended up going to Mickey D’s twice, for a total of $18, and made a whopping 4 trips to convenience stores, for a total of almost $33. Holy frick! $15 was well-spent on a cat cafe (though I’m a little sad the cats weren’t more cuddly), so that was good, but when you consider the sheer unhealthiness and cost of the fast food, energy drinks, and one or two candy bars, I only had $34 left over, and that’s not counting the lunch I would normally have paid for, which at that restaurant usually comes out to $20 with tip. It doesn’t even leave enough for a $40 book, on a week I specifically dialed back my spending. Friends, this is how you do stupid with money, and now it kind of makes sense how I’ve been exceeding my budget every month.
Now, I’m not opposed to getting lunch or dinner a few times a week, but I’d rather do it with friends than alone, and spending $9 per meal at Mickey D’s – forgetting how generally unhealthy it is – seems kind of insane. But more egregious than that is the money spent on energy drinks and junk. I tried to scale back on those, and even made it Tuesday without any, but the next day I had a terrible headache and was incredibly tired, so the siren song of caffeine was a little too strong to resist. Friends, don’t drink this crap. It’s designed to be highly addictive, it really is, and it does absolutely nothing good for you. I need to seriously find some way to get onto normal coffee and off of this crap. I know I get cabin fever easily and sometimes really need to get out of the house, but there needs to be a better way to channel that energy than going out and spending money.
The funny thing about spending $9 on a fast food meal is that $5.50 buys a pound of ground beef. I’m not sure what my homemade hamburger buns cost per bun, but suffice it to say that that $9 could easily make 3 or 4 meals with some oven baked fries, and doing so would use far cleaner ingredients. Moreover – and I lament this all the time – spending $3-4.50 on breakfast energy drinks has an enormous opportunity cost when you think what else it could buy you, such as the ingredients for my beloved homemade blueberry smoothies. I think $33 would probably buy me a little over two weeks of daily blueberry smoothies, which consist of some of the most nutrient-dense and highest-quality ingredients in my diet.
It’s just insane to me, this week should have cost me essentially nothing, but I think this little experiment has really highlighted how bad some of these habits have gotten. Sometimes you don’t realize how bad things are until you set out to really measure them. It’s not the $40, or $50, or even $60 books, it’s the sugar junk and fast food, and that’s from somebody who doesn’t (technically) work. I don’t know, man, if I’m concerned about losing weight and spending less, that’s probably the smartest place to look for easy wins. Stop spending money to eat junk!