It's not that I'm cheap. Well, no, let me revise that: it is that I'm cheap. And I guess that's the end of the statement? Wow, I thought there was going to be more to it than that.
No, of course there's more! That's an area in which I've never known parsimony, in words. Or even letters, I suppose. Like, there was no reason to use "parsimony" there, but when all it costs me is a bit of typing, I'm Mike Tyson's spending habits. Why not buy a tiger? And a tiger leash, how much more could that cost really?
I've got some real-world experience as an actual poor person, way back when I was in what are understatedly called the "formative years," back in (what seem to me to be) the beginning times of when being poor made you a political enemy and morally suspect, in the good old days of Ronald Reagan, the first of America's charming racist grandpas to win 49 states in a general election. Luckily that hasn't turned into a tradition of cruelty and disregard-to-the-level-of-hostility half the American electorate feels beholden to as a "tradition" or anything. Imagine if we were still a place that punished people for being in the lower half of a zero-sum equation. We'd be monsters!
Like a lot of raised-poor people, every dollar I have feels like it's worth about seven. All outgoing expenditures feel like the first pebbles of an avalanche that will drive me right off the edge of the financial cliff and somehow end up not just in the poorhouse, but somehow also in 1983. It's a powerful and uncontainable neurosis that thankfully doesn't show up on dates or with my kids, but the idea of spending a dollar on myself is like suggesting I stab out my own kidneys. Which is crazy because health care in this country, the co-pays alone to treat something like that... you couldn't even sell a kidney to pay for it because you just stabbed it voluntarily. That's the kind of tragedy-loop financial thinking that will kill you every time, in this case possibly literally.
I bring this up because I sit here today, perfectly still, in climate-controlled comfort, but sweating because I just had to buy a couch and a love seat. They're leather and handsome enough I suppose, but still all but the cheapest ones I could find of any quality. The old ones I had gotten for free when I was still married, about 20 years ago now, from my in-laws. So they were already used, but my in-laws had great taste and liked quality, so they (the couches, not the in-laws) held up great until the holes started to arrive and the seams started to split last year (again, not the in-laws. They seem to be holding up great). And that was last year. The purchase of a big-ticket item like this took me... I dunno, six months of shopping around? By that I mean wandering through furniture stores (all of the furniture stores) and talking myself out of shit I kind of maybe liked. I call this hate shopping, which has the benefit of being both bias-confirming (I told you all the options were bad! The only thing to do is wait, maybe forever!) and cost-free, minus the gas. You'd be surprised how far I'm willing to drive just to definitively not buy something.
The other part about growing up poor is there's also so much shabbiness you can tolerate before you feel like someone is going to find out you used to get free school lunch and then, I don't know, take your house away, so the time came. I will tell you I spent about $2,500 for the couch and love set together, which is as close to nothing as I could manage. They did have one returned, slightly damaged couch on its own at the store for about $375, but my son talked me out of it just because it was way too small for what I needed and the cushioning felt like you were sitting a sack of palm fronds.
So that's me done spending money for the year. My backyard is weeds and possums, but it will have to wait. The water heater could go at any minute, but we'll live in that could as long as it holds out. My car needs some maintenance repairs, but as long as it doesn't need to be towed to get them, it can wait. Last year I went to Switzerland with someone who had airline and hotel miles to subsidize the whole thing, which now I have a bit of a desire to see more stuff. My oldest kid is going to (in order) Boston, Japan and Seattle this summer, because he has no mortgage and a full-time job. That could be me. But he grew up solidly middle class, his whole outlook makes zero sense to me. Maybe I've been too supportive.
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