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I Thrift Shopped — And Survived to Tell the Tale
My closet, once overflowing with clothes has been halved, halved again, and then halved yet again since minimalizing my home a bit less than a year ago. I still have an ample amount of clothing, which tells you how much I had before. Despite my learned frugality, one spendthrift habit has eluded me until now:… [Continue Reading]
Other Posts This Week
Getting my clothing spending down to 5%
I think it was the lovely Adina J that told me clothing should be 5% of your spending (or maybe it was 3%?). Not sure if she heard this rule somewhere or if she made it up herself, but regardless, she is a frugal and fashionable woman so I trust her judgement. And thus my new personal spending rule is this:
Clothing should be 5% or less of your overall spending.
Why this is a good idea:
- instead of being a fixed amount, a percentage is proportional to my income. Therefore, the more money I make, the more I’m allowed to spend.
- limiting my spending on clothing will result in more money elsewhere, which means more for debt payments, savings, or important items like furniture.
- limits will force you to evaluate your choices. If you know you can’t have it all, you will instead select what’s most important. I’m all for prioritizing my wardrobe to keep junk out!
I’ve been tracking my spending for a few years now, and I know I spend more than 5% of my money on clothes. It never feels like I do, because I don’t own a lot of clothes. When I become bored with something, I give it to my sisters or donate it to Goodwill without a second thought.
I remain really dedicated to a minimalist wardrobe. I can just feel when I have too much stuff and it gives me anxiety until I cut back. If my entire closet amounts to more than 4 loads of laundry, it’s time to get rid of stuff.
However, owning fewer items frequently gives me the illusion that I spend less on clothing than I really do. In reality, I spend a ton of money on clothes.
I like expensive items. Fabrics like leather, silk and cashmere aren’t cheap to buy OR keep, but they’re my favorites. Sweatshop-free cotton tees are 3x the price of those at H&M or Forever XXI, and denim made within North American borders will have a price tag that reflects a North American minimum wages.
My clothing budget also reflects regular tailoring, dry-cleaning, and shoe repair expenses, which count towards the 5% total.
For 2013, I was heavy on clothing shopping early in the year. I bought a pair of leather boots early in January and stocked up on my favorite jeans when I went to visit my parents in Utah. These two shopping trips alone account for at least 1/3 of what I’ve spent on new clothes this year! Since then I’ve slowed my clothing spending down, save for a recent stock up on basic t-shirts from American Apparel for summer (using my spending account, so I shopped guilt-free!), I’m hoping to see the percentage drop. To date this is how my spending looks:
total spending so far for 2013
Eep! Nearly 8% on clothes and I still need a new pair of sandals =( How can I bring my clothing spending down to 5% of the pie? Two ways:
1) Cut down spending on clothing (obvious, right?)
2) Increase spending elsewhere.
Now, I don’t want bigger bills to pay and I shouldn’t go crazy and spend more on food, but if I increase my debt payments and investment spending, each of those categories will grow thus shrinking the clothing spending slice of the pie. All around source of win!
So my plan going forward is to slow down — but not eliminate! — my spending on clothing while increasing my debt payments and buying some more stocks. Can’t go wrong there ;)
Cheating Your Finances: the morality of marriage & money
I am a regular reader of the MoneySense website and it is a vast resource of financial information. I was browsing through the website recently and found an answer to a reader-submitted question that irked me. The question is part of a series entitled ‘Awkward Questions’, and awkward doesn’t begin to describe it. Here is the question taken from the MoneySense article:
“There’s a woman I’m very close to and I’d like to make sure she’s taken care of financially after my death. How can I discreetly set aside money without my wife knowing?”
Call me old-fashioned but I found the selection of this question in poor taste. We are all aware that extra-marital affairs unfortunately happen all of the time. But instead of suggesting not to give the mistress money or to come clean about the affair, the author Larry MacDonald advises the reader on how to set up a secret trust or to ask a friend to secretly give the funds to the mistress.
A child deserves financial support from his or her parents. If a secret child resulted from an affair, coming clean to one’s spouse is the only viable option. Yes, you may lose your spouse. That is the risk that you sign up for when you make the conscious decision to cheat.
Some may not want to come clean about an affair of the past because it will only hurt their partner. The man in question is looking to take away money that should go to his wife. When you are secretly attempting to affect your spouse’s livelihood after your death, that is a big problem. It would be slightly less slimy if both partners earned incomes and kept finances separate, but more often than not finances are shared between partners. This means that while you could have been spending the winters of the rest of your life solo in a condo on the beach in Florida, your husband has been discreetly siphoning part of your nest egg into a secret account for his other woman, limiting your financial freedom. If my future husband pulls this sort of thing and I find out, it will be wise for him to hop on the first flight to China and sleep the rest of his days with one eye open and a bat beside the bed.
Here’s the thing. If you are going to cheat on your partner, you should not give the other man or woman money. If you have a secret love child, it’s time to own up to your actions and take care of the life you brought into this world openly. And if someone asks you for advice, take a minute to think of a few suggestions that go beyond assisting a cheater to sneak finances around behind his partner’s back.
My Employer Is Making Cuts
The Premier of Alberta recently pissed everyone off by proposing cuts to education. This includes funding cuts to public universities, which means my employer which is now facing a $150 million dollar shortfall.
Bummer.
How this will affect things, including my job, remains to be seen. At this point, students and staff are protesting on the Alberta Legislature grounds on a regular basis, so it’s possible with enough outcry the budget will be adjusted, but personally I’m not super optimistic.
I will save my rant about the value of education and the purpose of universities to educate the populace for another time.
Rest assured I hold both common and controversial views on the purpose and effectiveness of the Canadian and provincial university system (and culture) that I am always eager to discuss at length, but I recognize that maybe not all my readers care to hear me wane philosophical about education.
Naturally, what I’m most concerned with is how these budget cuts will affect ME.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that I could be laid off. Whether or not I’m taking this possibility seriously enough remains to be seen, but I have considered foregoing additional debt repayments in order to bolster my emergency fund. With so little left to go, slowing down now totally sucks — but is being unemployed with debt worse? I’ve gone ahead and updated my resume, but I’m not looking for jobs. I don’t think losing my job is a likely scenario, so I’m being careful to err on the side of “prepared” rather than “panicked”.
What has already been cut is travel. Every six months, I travel to Vancouver for a few days of work. I usually take this opportunity to tack on a few vacation days to enjoy one of my favorite cities in Canada. A weekend in May in Vancouver is always on the schedule, but when I hadn’t heard anything about it by the end of April I knew the worst was true: it’s not happening this year. I’m on the verge of tears just thinking about how I’m not at Acme Cafe as we speak. I’ve been on one work trip to Calgary this year, but how many more times I’ll head south is unknown, and whether or not I get Toronto and/or Vancouver in the Fall is also uncertain.
Travel was one of my most favorite parts of my job! I was racking up WestJet dollars, hotel points, and premium car rental memberships like nobody’s business. I’ve logged so many hours at the airport, it just feels like a big bus terminal to me. TRAVEL IS WHY I LIVE.
So while I’m really sad one of the best part of my jobs is being axed, I understand I was really privileged to have it in the first place. I had a really awesome time on all my work trips — it often didn’t feel like work! Ok, that’s a lie, there were some snowy days in Calgary that I wished to be anywhere else… but for the most part, traveling for work was nothing but fun. That said, I also understand that traveling for work encouraged me to spend more money than I would otherwise. By adding vacation days to my work trips, I had to pay for those expenses: hotels, dinners out, differences in cost for changing my flights, etc. Hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars more just because I had the opportunity to spend.
Maybe I should adopt the perspective that, as my employer tries to save money, I will be forced to save money?
In any case, you can see that I’m dealing with some uncertainty and challenging circumstances right now — which yes, has been the secret source of stress over the past 8 weeks that I’ve tweeted ambiguously about (5927529742 apologies to everyone I ignored emails from, deadlines I missed, and whatever else. I sucked at a lot of things lately, and this is why). I’m not super keen on job hunting and bolstering my emergency fund, while trying to save up money to buy furniture AND still hoping extra dollars fall out of the sky to pay off the remainder of my student loans.
Life! It gets so tricky sometimes.
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