The $65 mistake

Bah! I’m so mad at myself right now! I generally hang on to our mortgage, quarterly tax payments, and the credit card bill until they’re due because, well, they don’t deserve our money before it’s due. Then I pay all the local bills on the first. Then we put money from the business in the checking account and pay all the big bills. But this time instead of hanging on to the biggies and mailing the local bills, I did it the other way around and bounced a check, a $65 mistake. It’s the first time I’ve ever bounced a check. You’d think I’d have done it when I was a student trying to live on $4000 a year but no I did it now.

I know I’m fortunate that it was only one bill rather than the whole stack of quarterly taxes that I’d sent out but still, this mistake has me reconsidering how we pay our bills. Maybe it’s time to go to an on-line bill paying service so I can time things so they get paid the day they’re due although I suspect that I can’t do all of them that way since we've got some small local businesses that provide things like trash hauling. I just don’t trust those services though; I like having a paper copy of what we’ve paid so I have proof that something was done. And that doesn’t resolve the timing issue with moving money from the business to the checking account.

Of course this also sets me up for the usual money obsessing. We spend too much and we need to stop doing that. I was really hesitant to go to GA because of the money but Ben convinced me that it would be fine because, well, because that’s what he would do. I’m much more fiscally conservative than him and that means that I came to our relationship with savings while he came to it with debt. And we really do spend too much. Ben just bought a PS2 (“they’re on sale now because the new one is coming out so it’s not that much money”) and a few computer games. Was that a necessity? No, but can I say anything when I just spent money on a plane ticket? We both need to curb our expenditures, especially with heating season on the way with only a 14% increase in fuel costs over last year…

Time to put operation anti-spendthrift into effect! Ben hates the idea totally and completely but it’s hard to argue when looking at the numbers which he generally avoids doing because they show that he spends a fortune on his hobbies. He’s pretty much admitted that he enjoys the shopping and acquisition phase of a hobby at least as much as the hobby itself but I’d say he likes it more. When he’s bought everything he “needs” to have the optimal set up for the hobby he loses interest and sells everything. Then the hobby cycle starts again. It could be worse; at least he sells the stuff instead of storing it here until he might want to go back to the hobby.

But I resolve I won't buy stupid stuff and I'll try my best to keep Ben from doing the same. This should be a real challenge!

Also, this sort of ties in with a book I recently read for our upcoming bookclub meeting, "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping" by Judith Levine. I had to buy the book to read it since the library didn't have and although I bought it used, the irony did not escape me. The premise of the book is that she and her husband would go a year without buying anything that wasn't a necessity. Of course there are many different definitions of necessity and theirs included such things as an internet connection, food but not prepared food, and work-related books. Oh, and the expenses related to owning three vehicles and two houses, one in NYC, the other in VT. And they had planned an addition for the VT location prior to staring the project so that had to go forward. They're hardly the average family especially since they also had no children. Basically they stopped going out and buying things for entertainment. They didn't buy clothes for themselves or gifts for other people. When they ran out of wine they started to make beer but they must have had to buy the equipment to brew the beer and I'm not sure where that falls on the necessity scale. Still, I'm sure it was somewhat challenging to have to rethink their purchasing behavior every day but that's something that the majority of people out there have to do anyway. One of the main points is that buying things is about status and without it you feel somewhat adrift although I suspect that is largely because of their previous expectations and social circle. If you never had it, would you miss it? Maybe you would if you had continuous access to the media. But one of the things that occurred to me when they described all the extra time they had as the result of their lack of shopping and lack of entertainment was that possessions also tie you to their maintenance and upkeep and that if you didn't keep buying things, you'd have time for things you've always wished you could do.