Among the definitions for austerity is the one that I'm thinking about in this blog: "Reduced availability of luxuries and consumer goods."
Some of its connotations are that of severe self-discipline or the WWII idea of limiting non-essentials during a wartime economy.
Over the past few weeks, we've been working on our resolutions and goals for 2013, along with a budget. With the looming fiscal cliff making for some awkward budgeting, we've been cutting expenses wherever possible--our own personal austerity measures.
We also have set some ambitious goals for 2013. More on that in a later blog post.
The end result is that 2013 is going to be a year where we want to continue having a positive quality of life, but also make some pretty radical adjustments on how we're managing money to be able to work towards some pretty significant goals. Our budget is "aggressive", but doable.
But managing money going out is only half of the plan. Many years ago, I caught a snippet of an episode of Oprah where Lady O mentioned that to reduce debt, you had to cut expenses because you couldn't just increase income.
I laughed, and the people I was with thought I was crazy. I pointed out that there's always the ability to increase income, but people don't want to do what is necessary to make that happen.
Thus the second part of our plan--prosperity stimulus. From selling things we don't need anymore (electronics to a buyback program, garage sales, book/CD/DVD trade-in) to finding new sources of income to increasing the amount of income for my current projects, we're looking to bring in more income while reducing our outflow.
The trick to getting ahead is a combination of the two. Austerity measures alone don't work. Prosperity stimulus alone doesn't work. When you combine the two, you can do anything.
When I was living in the US, one way that I would "buy" a lot of books, CDs, and DVDs is through Swap.com. Using the ISBNs, you put up a list of what you want and what you have. They match you up with trades. All you have to pay for is postage. And when you are talking DVD boxsets, or out of print books, the $2 media mail isn't bad. Plus since you could print postage paid labels from the website, I could just drop the packages in the mailbox between the Metro and my office on my way to work.
ReplyDeleteAnd sometimes it is easy to forget the public library where you can borrow all types of media (including downloads to your Kindle!)