Christa, Day 17: The Not Buying Habit

Here's a silly little thing about me: I like to track how many days in a row I can go without spending any money directly.

What do I mean by directly? In a way, I'm spending money all the time, just on credit or in advance. For example, right now there's a chocolate chip peanut butter cake in my oven. I spent money on the ingredients that went into it. I'm using electricity and gas to bake it. I drove today, so I technically cashed in on an advance purchase. And so on. In a consumer-oriented industrialized society, we're never really not spending money.

But bear with me, because I'm not complaining. There's nothing inherently wrong with spending money. Heck, if we were totally self sufficient, we'd never not be spending time. We'd always be spending something by using or acquiring other things. That's called being alive. Today's voluntary simplicity idea?

Limit your buying habits. If you are a slave to materialism and consumerism, there are ways to escape it. I was there, and although I haven’t escaped these things entirely, I feel much freer of it all. If you can escape materialism, you can get into the habit of buying less. And that will mean less stuff, less spending, less freneticism. Read more.

My main buying habit is not buying. Seriously. It's a habit that was really easy to slip into back in the days when I was living in Brooklyn and frequently had to choose between things like food and clean clothing. It's not like recreational shopping is a possibility when you're working for less than minimum wage - shhh, don't tell the labor department - and have $2,000 in credit card debt.

Can shopping be fun? Sure, as long as it's on someone else's dime. Just kidding. I know shopping must be a fun pastime for some people, based on how many cars I see in the mall parking lots on a Saturday around lunchtime and the fact that you can find just about anything in that mall online for cheaper. There has to be some reason all those people are at the mall, and my guess it's for the shopping.

Not buying is what let me pay off my credit card debt while making less than minimum wage. Not buying let me buy the occasional bottle of gin during those years and in the years beyond. Not buying let me get out from under debt a second time. Not buying let me stay home with my daughter for two glorious years because it gave me the freedom to work part time, from home. Not buying keeps me from being a slave to trends or clothes or junk that I'm just going to donate a few months later. Not buying keeps my house from being filled up with stuff.

So overall, escaping material is great... now. But I'll admit that for years, I hated it and didn't know how to handle it. Why could "everyone else" have new clothes? Why could "everyone else" have a designer purse? Why could "everyone else" have a nicer or newer X, Y, and Z? Except, duh, looking back I know that is some solid BS. Everyone else doesn't have anything in particular - some people have stuff, some don't. Some who have it can't afford it, and some who can just don't. It took me a long time to understand that. A surprisingly long time. Years.

Years during which I avoided advertising. Having no TV service, reading no magazines, using ad blockers on my browser, sticking to blogs that maintain that if you don't want to buy it you can probably make it, and actively rejected the ubiquitous advertising mantra that if you buy X, Y, and Z you'll be happier, taller, younger, smarter, prettier, more popular, and more successful. Because duh again, a product like that doesn't exist.

Honestly? I'm kind of cheap. I like free fun because there's plenty of simple free fun to be had. I like making things myself because it really knocks people out. I've noticed that for a lot of people, the urge to spend and spending itself is an automatic thing that goes unexamined because we're taught that spending is the key to happiness. People want, and never ask themselves why they want. People spend without analyzing their habits. Not ALL people, but plenty. And that, I think, is how financial strife begins.

Call me cheap or tightfisted or uncool, but I'd rather have plain old happiness and most of my money sitting in a high yield savings account than a designer purse or new clothes any day.