Opportunity cost is something I think about on a fairly
regular basis. With limited life resources (time, energy, and money, for
instance), it is amazing how quick everyday life makes a dent in resources.
With Lily entering school, all of those resources will be lowered. I will lose
time driving her to and from school, and there is cost in fuel and in tuition
that will come about.
A while back, I noted that if I walk into Target, I will
walk out with the bank account $100 lighter. Typically I go once a week. Yep,
that means $400 disappears out the bank every month, and for the life of me, I
have no real idea where it goes. Looking at the receipts, there’s food stuff
and consumables, but most of the stuff is things that just blend into the
background clutter of the house.
I also look at the cost of eating out—or in our case, mostly
carryout. We’ve cut back a lot, but in a typical month we’re still spending
between $150-200 or more in a month on restaurant foods.
Then there’s the Dutch Market…my new place for disposable
income to disappear. Poof, $30 in cheese. Shazaam, $15 at the dry good’s store.
Woosh, $60 in meats.
In all of those cases, I’m the driving force between pushing
money out of the house on things we don’t need.
I was thinking a few days ago of doing a short-term sugar
fast. I am a fan of using fasts from time to time (short, controlled ones,
though!) to try and help break a cycle. In musing on things, I wondered what it
would be like to do a “retail fast” for a period of time—for instance, three
weeks no shopping/one week to restock.
Here’s the ground rules I am thinking of setting for myself:
1. This applies to me and me alone. If my daughter needs
something, she gets it. If my husband needs/wants something, he gets it. If the
cats need something, they get it. All of this with the caveat that good
planning is in order—I can buy things that I know that we’ll need for the fast
in advance (that’s what that fourth week is for!). If I know we need 3 bags of
cat litter, I buy them in advance, for example. The only way this applies to my
family is that I’d like to try and avoid eating out.which brings me to number
2.
2. Our Saturday morning trips to Panera are still a go. This
is good family time, and they can be budgeted for easily. My husband’s coffee
money also doesn’t get cut, nor does any money he needs to do for eating out
during the week. If people take us out to eat, or there is a social situation
where we need to go dutch, we will do that. The goal of this is to make our
life better, not to make our quality of life miserable!
3. There are a few things that will need to be purchased
regularly. Although I can easily stockpile milk for the length of the fast,
fresh bananas have to be bought on a regular basis. The items that we pick up
from the CSA don’t count (as they are already prepurchased), and if there’s a
short season for some fruits or vegetables that necessitates stockpiling, that
is an acceptable purchase.This also goes for things like fuel, where we can’t
stockpile (safely) three week’s worth of car juice.
4. Emergencies happen, and there will be times when it will
be necessary to buy a little this or that to handle it. This also doesn’t apply
if we’re on the road somewhere.
5. Bills, obviously, are not included in this.
Am I crazy? Quite possibly, but I think this is something I
do want to try. If I’m going to do it, I’ll set a start date for June 25
through July 16 for no shopping and then the week of July 23 being a shopping
week. And, of course, I’ll detail how it
goes…
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