Conscious Spending
There’s a great blog called I Will Teach You To Be Rich that has a great article about conscious spending. The idea is that it’s not so much what you spend on, or how much you spend on it. It’s that you know in advance what you’re doing and do it smartly, instead of spending without thinking and regretting it later.
The article gives examples of people who want to spend $5,000/year on shoes or $21,000/year on going out. The amounts may seem ridiculous for the activities, but the people in the examples have the money to do this after they’ve budgeted for necessities and savings for the future.
Even if your budget is way too small to allow anything like those expenditures, there are still decisions you can make. For example, don’t just unconsciously sign up for cable along with the more basic utilities when you move. Consider that maybe you’d rather spend $20 per month on a Netflix account and watch movies and TV shows when you want. Consider that satellite dishes can be half the cost of cable. Consider that maybe you don’t even like TV or movies, and all you really want to use the TV for is video games. You can put the money you’ve saved on cable into something else – something fun, something practical, whatever.
If there’s something you really want to do but can’t afford, look at your budget and see if there’s something you can cut out. For example, lattes and restaurant lunches during the work week. Will cutting those out afford you that hobby or item you want? If so, you might not find it so hard to live without them when you know it means an extra bit of vacationing.
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