ast year I treated myself to a second-hand Herman Miller desk chair. It cost me $400. I instagrammed a picture of it and some guy had a go at me and said he’d never spend $400 on a chair and that I was an idiot. It must have been a slow day at the office because for some reason, I scrolled through this person’s Twitter feed and saw an update of how proud he was that he didn’t go over his $200 drinks budget at the pub on Saturday night. My chair, that I sit in every single day was worth just two of his Saturday night drinks budgets and yet I’m the idiot that was wasting my money.
This got me thinking about how people categorise their money and prioritise it. As someone who publishes tidbits about my life on the internet every day, I get lots of comments about the things I spend my money on. I’m going to explain my purchasing choices because I think a lot of my Smaggle readers will benefit from the way I engineer a buying a decision. For example…
* I will always spend $250 on one pair of shoes instead of $60 on four pairs of shoes because my comfort is worth it. I don’t save any money by buying cheap shoes. I simply have to replace them more often.
* I have a cleaner that I pay $50 per fortnight to clean my house for an hour and a half. It takes me about 3 hours to clean my house and if I was going to pay myself my freelance hourly rate to do that, it would cost a lot more than $50. This is a simple maths equation and having a cleaner actually saves me money, not to mention my sanity.
* I buy beautiful, quality clothing less often rather than regularly buying cheap stuff. These items last longer, they don’t lose their shape and they’re classic designs that I can wear for years. I won’t buy a $60 dress only to have it look terrible after one wash. What a waste.
* If I buy something online in my own city and they offer me a $20 delivery fee or I can pick it up myself, I will always pay the $20 delivery fee. $20 is a bargain if it’s going to save me two hours stuck in traffic.
When making big purchasing decisions, I always try to think about the outcomes if I chose NOT to spend that money. For instance I recently had to travel to Canberra for an important family event but flights were about $400. It was much cheaper to fly to Sydney for $200 and then hitch a ride with family the remaining distance. This added about 10 hours to my travel time, I was exhausted the entire following week and I spent about $100 on travel snacks, drinks and meals because I was in transit for almost 2 full days. That wasn’t a great life choice. Yes $400 is a lot of money but 10 hours is a lot of time and sometimes you have to weigh up which is worth more to you. If I had a do-over of that weekend, I’d fork out the $400 for flights because I simply wouldn’t work ten hours on a weekend for a day rate of $100 (the amount of money I saved by travelling on the cheap). It would have been a different story if I didn’t have the extra $100 but truthfully, I did have the money and I was just being a tight ass. I won’t be doing that again.
The same rule applied when my partner and I bought our treadmill. We thought very carefully about it, researched it properly and paid $1500 for it. For some people, that is an amount of money they would never even consider spending like that, but many people pay around $30 per week for gym memberships. In one year an average gym membership costs $1560 which is the same as the treadmill. We’ve now had our treadmill for 2 years and it gets used almost every day by both of us. It’s not only saved us money but it’s made daily fitness a certainty. It doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold or raining – we can always fit a run in. I’ve had people scoff at me that they could never afford a treadmill and these are people that I know for a fact are paying $30 per week on a gym membership they never use. It’s bizarre.
Everyone has different budgets and the way other people manage their finances isn’t my business but sometimes I observe the weird ways in which people spend money and it fascinates me. I just find it perplexing that these are usually the people that think it’s extravagant to spend $200 on lovely bedsheets that I’ll spend 8 hours every day using, yet they don’t think twice about dropping that amount on over priced cocktails every Saturday night.
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What’s your money mentality? Do you count your time as a factor when forking out your dosh?
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P.S If you’re a blogger and you can get to Melbourne on the 21st March you should come to the Little Blog Big Workshop I’m running with Hair Romance and Sesame Ellis. Get in quick though – tickets are selling like half price Bettina Lianos.
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