Things are looking up but the American economy has a long, slow climb back to normalcy, according to Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner in an op-ed in today’s New York Times.
What’s been helping me improve my personal economy is spending my spare change—defined as the scratch left-over after I pay rent, transportation, utility bills and food expenses—more responsibly.
First, I’ve been eating and drinking (especially alcohol) in instead of out, which saves a lot. Groceries (even prepared food from a supermarket) and wine/beer/liquor at retail clearly cost much less than similar items at a restaurant or bar.
To curtail my slight addiction to clothing and various media, I’ve stopped reading blogs and magazines that are product-focused, such as Apartment Therapy and Esquire. Because I buy most of my wants online, I’ve also stopped logging into my alternate email account, which is where all of my sale-notification emails come in. This prevents me from seeing the coupons, discounted items and new-item notifications at places such as Amazon.com, Borders, Gilt Groupe, Jack Spade and others that used to sap my spare funds. Too often, I found myself buying something merely because it was advertised in an email or online—even though it was an item I likely wouldn’t have bought (or even thought of) outright.
Also, in the past few months, I’ve stuck with a new strategy of simply listing everything I want to buy for myself that’s beyond a necessity in a Google Document or, in the case of clothing, pasting a photo and details on the item into my Moleskine. The Google Document is sorted by books, CDs, DVDs, bike-related stuff and stuff for my apartment, and it's satisfying to merely classify and store away an item—it quells my urge to spend.
Tellingly, I’ve found that revisiting this list to add items reveals that I seldom remember what I’ve committed there, which tells me that I didn’t need that item to begin with. In fact, only once have I opened the list to add an item and found it was already there, on account of my poor memory. I'm thinking this may be the best way to determine whether I really want a non-essential item. There may be an ice-cream maker in my near future. Or, if I wait long enough, the weather will turn cold and I won’t want one.