Diagnosis: Affluenza January 11-17th

I think I've finally figured out a format for this. As usual, I started the week with $250, $30 of which went into a brokerage account for me to invest. That left $220. I then got paid for some contract work ($100) and sold an old gift card I didn't plan to use to a friend for $80 which brought my total income to $400. I also had $184.25 left in my checking account from the four weeks since I started to use this money plan.

Here's what happened to that $584.25 this week. Our ski trip plus the computer repair took an incredible bite out of my budget and what I'd saved so far.

Purchases in green are purchases that I consider reasonable. Purchases in orange are purchases that I should've thought more about or prepared for but didn't. It would be good to avoid these purchases until I have more money saved. The purchases in red are purchases that I should be skipping until I have $600 in savings. I've picked $600 as a result of looking at previous months' spending. I noticed that I have a habit of making about a $300-$400 purchase on something unnecessary or unexpected every month. This month was probably the most unexpected and totaled $600, so that seems a good amount to aim for.

Anything with an asterisk is an object. So this week I acquired two things, well, I suppose four things. I plan on working to keep that number low. Four objects a week is 200 objects a year! And since we've got 1200 square feet to work with, that could be a problem! So let's go look at a "bad" week:

I can't legitimately expect anyone to read this chicken scratch, can I?

Starting bank balance: $584.25 Weekly budget: $220 Extra income: $100 from contract work Extra income: $80 from selling an old gift card EXPENSES: Mac repair: $290 Physical therapy: $ 35 Guitar lesson: $45 *Ski boots: $230 *Ski poles: $50 Lunch with friend: $30 Star Trek Kindle book (stop laughing!):  $8 Two iTunes songs: $3 Total expenses: $691.00 $291 over budget Bank balance: $-106.75

I should probably avoid iTunes and amazon for a while.  That's going to be a hard habit to break, but at least it's not expensive. Okay, just one book and one song next week. I'll try to get down to zero after that. For just a little while. Lunch with my friend Bret is does make me wince, but at least it's only once a month and friends are more important than money. We "treat" each other to lunch every other Friday, meaning we each only end up paying once a month. I may want to suggest a less expensive locale in the future. 

For the next couple weeks I'll have three regular expenses: $70 of physical therapy a week and weekly $45 guitar lessons. That leaves $100 each week. I'll need to be careful so I can pay back the Chief Engineer for my ski boots in the next two weeks. I was doing well for a while, especially the first two weeks. Time to hunker down a little more. 

In terms of our family spending, we've made another change: This month I don't get to look at our household finances except on the last day of the month.  The Chief Engineer and I temporarily changed passwords on our accounts to ones that only he knows. Why? Because I have a nasty, OCD-habit of checking our bank accounts and our credit card sometimes several times a day. It's a little (or a lot!) ridiculous. If I can't stress about my eating disorder, I stress about money instead. With food, when I angst over it I end up eating more. Maybe if I angst over the bigger picture of our family finances I end up spending more than if I just leave them alone.

In spite of the ski trip it feels like we've spent less money this month. I've spent more evenings consciously trying to do things that don't involve shopping, spending money, or planning to spend money in any way. I don't spend a lot of time spending money but I do spend a lot of time planning to spend money. I'm trying to distract myself and see if it makes a difference. Instead of planning to buy stuff, I've done some quilting, caught up on much of the Law and Order and Start Trek episodes that I missed while I was in college, read lots of free online fiction, and for the first time in over a decade I finally sat down and started writing some fiction of my own. It felt really, really silly good.

I'm quite a bit happier than I was when I was angsting about our money. Hopefully I'll eventually be able to wean myself of recording everything I spend out of my own bank account.

See you all for Dx: Affluenza next Saturday!

Back in business

But it's a good thing I'm not a business, because I'd be broke and out of business if I were.

Stop laughing! It's a ridiculous 
background screen and I LOVE it! 

My laptop made it back to me this week after a vacation at the Apple store. It completely died on me and ended up needed pretty much everything but the screen and casing replaced, which came to a whopping $290. I gotta admit I feel like I got a real deal though. Apple's flat rate service and labor for laptops covered a new motherboard, new trackpad, new keyboard, and new solid state drive for under $300. If I'd bought the pieces separately I would've come closer to $1500. Makes me wonder how I managed to break all four of those things given that only the keyboard has moving parts...anyways, I'm back to blogging again. 

Financially the week has been a disaster. Last week I managed to twist my ankle and ended up at the doctor's with a $35 copay and a $55 brace. Add physical therapy for another old injury, and then the laptop....and would you believe the real stupidity hasn't even shown up yet?

The slopes around here finally opened and we went skiing for the Chief Engineer's 30th birthday this week. For what it was, it actually wasn't all that expensive. Middle-of-the-week lift tickets are $25 a day, or about 1/3 of weekend prices on the east coast. He's an avid skiier so he's had on his own gear for a while so there's no need to rent his equipment. We pack in our food so it just ends up being the cost of lift tickets, gas out to the mountain (which isn't much since we own a car with great fuel economy), and one night in a hotel. 

Except I can manage to make anything more expensive and I can always manage to acquire more stuff. On this trip I already had my own skis but didn't have boots or poles, which was fine, figuring I could rent boots and I've skied well without poles in the past. Apparently I was wrong. You can rent skis alone, you can rent helmets alone, you can rent poles alone. But apparently you can't use your own skis and rent boots anywhere. Ask the lawyers, because I don't understand it. 

I will *make* these worth it.

My choice ended up being, buy boots or don't ski at all. I ended up dropping $230 on these. They're quality boots and should last me over a decade. But to make matters worse, after the first day I ended up also spending $50 on poles.  I sat and beat myself up about doing something else that took us financially one step further away from going to Australia in January next year. I realized that these not-so-little sudden financial expenditures are coming at more than a financial cost because each thing I spend money on means there's something else that can't happen instead.

Then I went and skied the best two days of skiing I've ever had. So I stopped beating myself up. I just have to decide what's most important to me. In the YNAB book, the author said something along the lines of, "If you find yourself consistently blowing $100 on shoes every month, the solution isn't to make yourself stop buying shoes, it's to admit that you're going to buy shoes and plan/budget for them." That means doing the splurge/impulse/unplanned purchases in place of something else.  

Oh. I get it now. 

My goal of completing the kitchen and going to Australia within a year? I've let go of it. We'll do the bare minimum on the kitchen and then will turn our focus towards saving for the Australia trip. I am willing to let go of the desire to have a new cabinet, sink, countertop, and backsplash in exchange for being able to ski and to go to Australia. I've lost my desire for the earrings I wanted. A new guitar? I'll get it eventually. And kids? Kids can wait.

A kitchen or this? Easy choice. 
Happy 30th birthday, darlin'!     

I don't think it quite hit me until I took one of the exactly two falls I had during the last two days (yes, pun intended!) but skiing and being pregnant don't mix, toddlers and skiing definitely don't mix, and I've MISSED skiing. The Chief Engineer and I had our first real date skiing together. We had several not-a-dates on the slopes before that. In high school on wintery Fridays my uncle would pick me up at school and he'd take me night skiing in the Pocono Mountains. I ski enough to make the purchase financially worth it and I love every minute I'm on the slopes. 

I knew rental gear was poor quality, but I don't think I realized just quite how poor. I performed well and had a FANTASTIC time! My gear will pay for itself in about 23 more days of skiing, compared with renting. That's about two years of skiing for me or less if the weather is good this year. But I'm enjoying skiing so much more now with the new gear and I'm now willing to give up other things I want so that I can keep skiing. And going skiing and suddenly hardly falling anymore because my gear actually works? Priceless.

Unfortunately there are two more immediate problems: 1.) I suddenly own two very large objects (well, four) that I didn't own before. Ski boots and poles are not small! I'll need to declutter a few things to make room. Not sure what yet.  2.) I spent about $106.75 more than I had in my bank account by buying the ski boots. I had enough to pay for the laptop repair and the ski poles but not the boots. So the Chief Engineer gave me a one time "payment plan." He put my ski boots on his credit card and I have exactly two weeks to pay him back to keep me out of overdraft. This was not the way I was hoping things would go financially. Details and a plan to get out of "debt" and not get back into it will come in tomorrow's Diagnosis: Affluenza post. 

It's not permission for me to go crazy. I've just learned that my personal financial buffer needs to be about $600, or what I ended up blowing on unplanned expenses this week. It will take time to build that up and I'm sure at some point I'll decimate those savings again in a matter of days. Clutter-wise, I need to clear out more clutter because objects I truly want and use like ski boots sometimes show up and need permanent homes. It's all about getting my priorities straight. I'm incredibly lucky to be where I am financially and I was killing myself trying to do everything. 

Next up: spending less next week to be able to pay the $106.75 back to the Chief Engineer. After that: paying for any skiing until the end of the season. After that? The kitchen wall comes down. After that? Saving for Australia.  That's the order in which things matter to us. Maybe something will have to wait. I'm okay with that. One thing at a time. And in time, too. 

Diagnosis: Affluenza

Today's the first post of my now regular "Diagnosis: Affluenza" posts, where I take a look at my personal spending in the last week in an attempt to acquire less stuff, learn to need less stuff, and learn to be more respectful and grateful of what I have. You'll see them on Saturdays, so I can still do Friday Fashion Fallout. But because I'm crazy on brand-new ED meds, I'll do Saturday on Friday this week and Friday on Saturday!

I want to first thank I Should Be A Minimalist for introducing me to something called You Need a Budget, more commonly known as YNAB. Oddly enough it wasn't the budgeting and putting-things-into-categories information that was the most helpful. I do lousy with budget categories. It reminds me too much of the dieting I did during the worst times of my eating disorder. No, it was the YNAB book that was the awesome eye-opener for me.

YNAB is effectively a really fancy spreadsheet. But you can download a free copy of the principles behind the YNAB-budget lifestyle. (He also sells the same thing on Amazon, but I don't know why anyone who cares about their money would do that instead of just printing out the obviously free PDF. Anyways.) The YNAB creator, Jesse, said that one of the best and worst parts of a budget is the moment when it shows you a time when you know you are not going to be able to make ends meet or achieve a particular goal.

Sounds pretty lousy, right? Not for us. Why? Because it let us know that our goals were way too lofty.

I'm thrilled that I'm no longer living paycheck to paycheck as I did after college and in grad school. I am blessed to be well off. Except that my spending has risen to the level of my professional paycheck. I've always spent just about every penny I make that doesn't get sent to a retirement fund before it leaves my paycheck. My husband doesn't have this problem. Why? Because I have affluenza and he doesn't. I have a need for stuff. Let's take a look at my "needs" for the next 2 years:

1. Make three changes to our kitchen. $27,000 (within 18 months, the max allowed by our condo association.)  It doesn't have to be done all at once though.

• Remove the wall in our galley kitchen so there's room for both of us. Cost: $7,000
• Add in an island so that we have more than one counter to prepare food on. $8,000
• Replace the countertops, backsplash, the damaged ceramic sink, and fix the couple water-damaged cabinets. $12,000

2. Go to Glacier National Park: $4,500 (already planned for June 2013, $2,500 of it is already paid for)

3. Go to Australia: $12,000 (Dec 2013?)

4. Have a baby: $12,000 for start-up costs, hehe

• Temporarily ignoring the $250,000 it will take to raise this kid from diapers to diplomas, I'll have to take three months off of work with no pay. We'll need to save about $9,000 to make up for that. Plus the cost of pre-natal care, meds, delivery, and diapers etc. in the first year, I figure $12,000 would be a good number to aim for.

5. Build up an emergency fund of $25,000  (in the next two years) and then continue to fund it with $1000 a month every year after.

6. Go to Spain. $4,000 (within 18 months)

7. Replace our 20-year-old TV: $1500 (within a year)

8. Sell my old guitar and get a 15/16 size instrument that fits my tiny hands so I can play without pain (by my 30th birthday in April.) Net cost: $300.

Total: $86,300 of activities. 

That is frakking insane. 

I do not need nearly $100K of activities to keep me happy in the next year.

Gram would be really, really ashamed of me and that thought makes me sad. No, it's time to get my priorities straight.

So here's what we figured out. The emergency fund comes first. Baby comes...whenever I can get off my lovely new eating disorder medications that are apparently, well, really dumb to be on while pregnant (I know there are some that are safe to take...I'm just apparently still too sick for those to be enough for me). And everything else comes as the money shows up. I get to let go of my goals a bit and stop stressing. I can't do everything. Problem with affluenza is, I think I can do and purchase everything.

We will be paying attention to our finances but we've discovered that locking ourselves into budgets (eg. $300 on food a month) just makes us both insane. Over the last few months we've tracked all of our  spending as a couple on things like gas, food, eating out, and day-to-day fun. The numbers are pretty consistent. It's a level we're content with. My husband's spending on stuff he wants is quite low and very fine. The point is just to pay more attention. If we don't have money for something, then we don't do it. I may have to give up or trim down Australia or Spain, or put off the kitchen as long as the condo association will let us. When we have $7000, we'll take the kitchen wall down. When we build back up and have $12,000 again, we'll get tickets and hotel reservations for the Land Down Under. Then Spain. Then the kitchen. And a little bundle of joy whenever that gets to happen. It's like debt snowballing without the debt.

But as we know, my spending on stuff is just stupid. I'm really the only one who needs to change. My erratic, impulsive spending is making it hard to plan what we can do when (this is a bit of a problem when you're trying to buy plane tickets to somewhere halfway around the world!) To help us know when we can afford to do one of the items on our two-year list, we've set up four accounts:

1. checking account, with enough to pay the bills in it
2. an emergency fund
3. a future expenses fund
4. a checking account just for me. It gets an allowance of $500 twice each month. Of this, $30 a week goes into a brokerage account so I can learn to invest (literally) in my future.

I can hear almost every one of you saying -- how is $220/week not enough for me?  All it takes is one $140 visit to my psychiatrist, one monthly $50 copay for the antidepressant that keeps me from injuring myself, and two $35 physical therapy appointments for me to blow $260 in two days. That's what last week looked like. It was a good thing I cancelled my guitar lesson last week because that would've brought me up to a total of $295 of expenses for that week and I only would've considered the guitar lesson optional. Healthcare in my town is boutique-style. Most providers around here don't take insurance. The ones who do are either hours away, are lousy providers, or have 3-month waiting lists for new patients (as is the case with every psychiatrist in a 10-mile radius who takes BlueCross health insurance. Bloody hell.)

But we know I like to spend for fun even beyond that. So the Chief Engineer helped me figure out the first of many changes that we'll have to make to keep me from spending and slowly teach me to stop wanting to spend.

The first step we took together was removing my online access to our joint checking account.  We've also taken away my credit card. In the event of an emergency I can call the bank and get access or visit the branch around the corner. I'm not brash enough to take money from the emergency or future expenses funds for myself. There is one exception, though -- my Renfrew eating disorder treatments go on our joint credit card. It's on file with Renfrew so I was actually able to destroy my plastic card so I can't use it. Ultimately, if the money is not my checking account I can't spend it. I don't have a credit limit on my debit card.

A cute money journal, just like in grad school

Something else we did came from an idea the Chief Engineer had. When I lived on $100 a week after paying my rent in grad school I kept a log of every single little thing I bought. The Chief Engineer thought we might gain some insight from those logs but it turned out that I'd trashed them in one of the five moves I've made since grad school. Silly me. But instead we started a new one. It worked in grad school.

It seems to be working now. We started this experiment two weeks ago and at the end of two weeks I had a little over $100 left in the bank. I just got my paycheck today and now have a little over $550 to get me through the next two weeks. Oh, and I have four physical therapy visits alone in there. Let's hope I can keep from running over to Guitar Center for this baby in the next month or two. I need to build up savings in case I, say, need another $800 crown like I did three years back.

So how do I build those savings and resist the long-practiced temptation of spending everything I have? What did I do in grad school that let me live on $100 a week and still buy the occasional expensive piece of jewelry? Patience, it turns out. It's something I've lost. When I wanted a $200 piece of jewelry in grad school, I stuck pennies, dimes, quarters and single dollars into an old coffee tin for six months before I finally bought the ring (and I still have it, love it, and wear it often.)


Say hello to the guitar fund! It's no longer a coffee can but it'll do. What can I say, I like fruit, even when it's plastic. I thought about pitching $20 bills into the sound hole of the guitar I have now, but somehow I think that might make my playing sound *so* bad that I would immediately rush out and buy a new instrument.

I've now told myself that I can have the guitar. I just can't have it now. That's a feeling I haven't felt in a while. But it's a good feeling. I will be able to have the guitar, I will eventually have enough saved to know that I can pay for a personal emergency if I need to, and I am learning to deal with the long-term ups and downs of stock market investing. It feels like a good year. I just need to be patient and relax. It's going to happen this time, because I've done it before.

Spend slowly. Save slowly. Think slowly. Change slowly. 

And stop buying cute Jordi LaBanda notebooks. 

(I must have 15 of these things. It's just glorified hoarding.)

My ovaries are screaming

You know you want a baby when some royal gets knocked up and you suddenly become insanely jealous.

I turn 30 in April. Yes, I know, I'm not old! I know! But the biological clock is ticking.  My parents spent years trying to have me and apparently I was finally coneceived in a petri dish. This could take a while. But before any of that happens, there are a few things that I want very much to do, because these things will be very difficult or impossible with small children.


When did my uterus decide
that this was a good idea?!

1.) Travel to Australia and snorkel in the great barrier reef. That unfortunately means we have to go during the one time of the year when it's warm enough to do that.

2.) Renovate part of kitchen (wall and new cabinet) so that the Chief Engineer and I can both fit in it!

The kitchen seems optional at first. But Fairy has seen first-hand that there's a bit of a problem with the kitchen. When she and her husband took their Great American Tour earlier this year, the three of us plus the Chief Engineer tried to stand in my kitchen. We managed it for about two minutes before we all got claustrophobic! There's definitely no safe space to put a baby where I could see him/her and still cook, so that needs to come before a kid.

About Australia. My mother suggested that we just leave the kid with her and my dad for three weeks while we travel (and leave my kid in the hoard?! I could come back and find my child buried under a pile of diaper boxes full of photos from when I was an infant!) I almost considered it though. But apparently I know nothing about mommying because I had to look up on a baby blog that no mom would want to leave her kid while she's still nursing! So no Australia post-baby, either.

Point being, those two things are going to be insanely expensive. But we've done the math, and getting it all done and paid for within the next 13 months means one scary thing: we need to trim $1000 per month off our expenditures, or we have to wait an extra year to have kids.

I need to get over my eating disorder so I can stop spending upwards of $300 a month on treatment. I've wanted to go to Australia badly for years, and the kitchen currently isn't conducive to family life. So I have to stop buying crap so I can buy the work on the kitchen. I have to stop shopping to soothe myself. I am not bringing my kid into a home where two serious mental health problems aren't under control.

And it's my choice, so I don't get to complain!

A different kind of disaster zone

That would be my finances. Click the image to enlarge.

Just a warning, this post is filled with a ton of angst. I am a spoiled, wealthy brat who realizes how much she has but is foolish with it. And I feel very ashamed, and really don't know how to change my ways. 

I let go this month. Our take-home pay decreased substantially because I contributed twice my usual to my pension thingy at work this month. In total, we only added $216 to our checking account and $415 to our emergency fund. Still -- only adding $600 in liquid savings feels really bad. 

Causes:
1. ED treatment got more expensive this month. My therapist just moved to California so I've been going to a bunch of trial appointments with what feels like every therapist in town. Eventually I'll find someone I like who takes my insurance but until then I have to pay for the full cost of the visits.
2.We ate out at a pricey place. First mistake: going to the hottest restaurant in the DC area for our wedding anniversary. Second mistake: trusting that they wouldn't try to kill us at dinner. If you have food allergies, Volt in Frederick is not a great place to go!
3. I didn't restrain myself when it came to entertainment. It's that simple.
4. I bought more Christmas presents. I felt it was better to split the present purchasing over three months. I only have about $60 worth of planned gifts to get yet, for a total of approximately $400 for the whole family, for $50 apiece. The remaining gifts complete the "baskets of local goodies" I've been planning to make. But next year I need to focus on more homemade gifts and also to set a budget.

Really, #2 and #3 are the biggest problems. I just have to restrain myself. I've got no choice if I don't want to find myself having to pay bills out of our savings.

It really gets worse.

The spoiled brat continues her spending, because this week she's taking another vacation to another ritzy destination. My MIL goes to the Caribbean and begged us to go with her. She offered to pay for food and for the hotel. We thought, 'what a deal!' Yeah, right. Airfare alone was $750/pp.

What's really going on here is that my FIL died a number of years ago and my inlaws used to go there every year. So there will be lots of things that will be done just for the endorphins. She already has plans to take me jewelry shopping (real jewelry shopping..."it's half what it is in the states!" she exclaimed). If I say I'd rather not spend money she will then offer to buy me something or will bring me back something I can't stand. And that is very dangerous. She tried to buy her say in our wedding, and I HATE it when she pays for things, because I feel like she's using money to gain some kind of invisible control over me. I feel like I'm in her debt. I feel that way about the whole vacation.

My husband is talking about snorkeling and renting boats and eating out...I just paid the pet sitter...my parents are coming over when I get back and they'll want to eat out a lot...and I'm overwhelmed.

My husband doesn't have a spending problem, I do. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle any of this. I used to never eat out and that was how I afforded all of the stupid things I would buy. But now I don't want to cut into his fun because he prefers to eat out and enjoy vacations and I can't control my spending on the little stuff.

Like the eating disorder, angsting over it makes it worse. Perhaps it's best to just talk with the guy I married and set a reasonable limit on how much to spend at the jewelry store, and to be okay with it. I have $250 in contract work coming to me this month. Perhaps that's a reasonable amount to spend.

And on top of it all, I know so many people who make so much less than I do, and yet I'm so careless with it.

It's not paranoia if they're really after you

The "you buy too much" goons are really after me now. And I deserve it.

I haven't decluttered much lately. I've also been buying more stuff than I'd prefer. We got spooked by a very large credit card bill this month, an unfortunate emergency room visit for the hubs (severe allergic reaction, it happens) and suddenly finding that our long-planned kitchen wall demolition could be moved up to this Fall instead of Winter. Cash (but not savings, fortunately) are tighter than expected. My hallway is getting crowded with stuff to discard that hasn't made it out of the house yet. The books that need to be sold on half.com are waiting to be listed. The clothes for the last few weeks' Friday's Fashion Fallout are still waiting for their date with the donation box.

The most urgent issue is that the purchasing MUST stop. But it's like the eating disorder, I can only go so long before the urge to binge (buy something) overrules the rational desire to behave normally.

At least with shopping, the urge to binge can be fixed safely. I bought a book for my kindle tonight, and then thought better of it. Apparently Amazon has a liberal Kindle books return policy. So I paged through it, got my fix, and returned it. It felt good.

I'm discovering that returning things helps my spending habits a bit. But I still buy too much in the first place. While this does in the end help keep my spending down, it requires a lot of energy. My mother would often buy things, swear she would return them and then I would find the item tossed into a corner in one of the offices later. I don't want to rely on returning things because I may end up getting too lazy to return them.

Do you buy and then return things? Or do you just buy and keep them, even if you regret the purchase?

Tribbles

My clothes keep multiplying. I'm getting better at not acquiring so many items. But unfortunately changing this habit isn't as easy as poisoning some grain on a space station. Okay, I'll stop with the Star Trek allusions for now.

As I recap my spending this month I'm taking a closer look at how many objects I'm bringing into my home. Not only do these things take up space but they tend to be unnecessary purchases. This month I purchased five objects that weren't consumable. Two of the five were pieces of clothing:

A pair of bike shorts to replace the old ones that I finally admit don't fit. It's hard to tell ED that it's okay that I need bigger bike shorts. But this made it final. I'm okay with this decision.

A pair of track pants. I got these because they looked incredibly comfy and I wanted something that would give me an excuse to get out of my work clothes when I get home instead of keeping them on and doing things like, oh, baking. And messing up my clothes. And needing to spend a fortune on dry cleaning. I know this was a lousy reason to spend a ton on another pair of pants. Next month my goal is to not buy any more clothes.

To keep up with my Friday's Fashion Fallout, I'm getting rid of three items:

Two more pairs of cycling shorts, replaced by the new bike shorts. These old bike shorts are multiplying like Tribbles. There will be more, I promise. I know there's at least one more pair in my dresser at my parents' place.  Their fate: The Goodwill store.

An old pair of scrubs that are stained in some unfortunate places. These can't be worn out of the house anymore. The track pants will replace them. Fate: rags.

Do you keep track of how many objects you purchase each month?

New anti-shopping rule: try to avoid stores when you feel lousy (or just got any injections)

Have you ever found yourself feeling truly awful and also found yourself in a store at the same time? What happened?

For me, nothing good was what happened. About two years ago I had hiked up to Baltimore from DC for a doctor's appointment. I took two trains, a taxi, and a walk in the rain to get to the office of an orthopedic surgeon who was an expert in an "unusual" shoulder problem I'd been diagnosed with a while earlier.

In the ten minute visit I got told there wasn't much they could do except stick a really, *really* long, really large needle in my shoulder and squirt in some cortisone. I would feel fantastic afterwards!

Sure. The "afterwards" is really, you know, the next day. In the meantime your arm is pretty much useless.

I naturally brought a ton of stuff with me on this five hour round-trip adventure and suddenly found that I couldn't really carry it anymore. I stopped in Macy's to purchase a small rolling bag to help me haul my belongings home.

I left with a $150 Tommy Hilfiger, top-of-the-line roller bag. Because I felt lousy.

Sure, it got my stuff home (why didn't I just bring less stuff?!). But a few weeks later I realized I had a bag that was actually much smaller than was useful and was seriously ugly. Oh, and I already owned a comparable bag.

Lesson learned: avoid stores when feeling lousy. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, it's all the same in this situation. When we feel lousy we're more likely to look for the first thing that will make us comfortable, and then our wallets and closets become the victims. Totally not worth it.  Has this ever happened to you?

The Reckoning

Item 131: One seriously ugly roller bag

Cost: $150

Fate: the thrift shop 

Total money wasted on junk: $1412.00

I bought lip balm because I was afraid

 

What if I need it again?

What if it breaks?

What if this is discontinued?

What if I can't replace it?

Hoarding and anxiety go hand-in-hand. For many people, including hoarders and non-hoarders, fear keeps us from letting go of objects we don't need.

It also plays a role in how we acquire objects.

Have you ever looked at something on a store shelf and had a sudden urge to buy a few extra? I perpetually have this urge. If I see something and love it, I want to buy more than one. Just in case. Sometimes I can tell myself no, like the time when I bought a $200 ring for myself and loved it so much that I wanted to get another in case the first broke. Fortunately the $200 price tag kept me from going back to the jewelry store.

Unfortunately it's much easier for us to grab extras of smaller items and consumables. We justify these purchases with the idea that we'll use it, or it'll be a backup.

Today's object is a set of lip balms I bought back in early college. My lips used to chap quite painfully and this was the first balm that contained an anesthetic. Without even trying one out to see if it worked, I bought four. These things would solve my problem, I thought, and I wouldn't want to run out. No kidding.

Fighting the Fears

FDR said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Admitting that we're purchasing things out of fears is hard. I purchased lip balm because I was afraid. Afraid I'd run out, afraid I wouldn't have anything to stop the pain of chapped lips, afraid I might never find the lip balm again. Seriously!? These are the things I angst about in my life?

The fears that drive hoarding habits are often irrational fears like these. Those fears can do an incredible amount of damage when we don't counter them.

Those of us with hoarding tendencies can't be told to simply "think about whether you'll use the item" before you buy it. Totally ineffective. Of course I'll use it! It may only be for a while, but sure, I use Eucerin hand cream. I use blouses. I use dental floss (okay, not always.)

Am I using my head? Probably not. I'm using my fears.

Finding the Rational Thoughts

Lately I've been asking myself two questions to curb irrational thoughts when I shop:

1. Why do I feel the need to purchase more than one of these?
2. Is some kind of  fear or insecurity driving this purchase? If so, is it a rational fear?

Respond to the fears


What if I need it again? You can always buy or borrow another one. You are blessed to have the financial resources to purchase things you really need. And if you don't need it, you *can* live without it.

What if it breaks? You can always buy or borrow another one.

What if this is discontinued? You can most discontinued items on eBay. If not, you'll find something newer and better.

What if I can't replace it? You'll live. It's just stuff.

Find your freedom from these fears. 

What fears lead you to buy too much? Or to keep things you should throw out?

The Reckoning

Item 65: A collection of four lip balms from my college days.


Fate:The trash can!

Cost:  These were $1.50 each. I only used about half of each for a total of $3.

Total money wasted on stuff: $ 390.