As you all know the last few weeks I have been reading a lot of new blogs, not just here at Multiply but at other places such as Blogger and Blog Spot. I have found some great ones. There are some brilliant craft ones that have me all fired up with a list of projects that I would like to do. I have also found some really good ones that write about simple living, green issues, sustainability, money saving and frugality. They too have me fired up.
I mentioned the other day that I feel quite strongly about making some changes to the way we live and part of that is a wish to live a more simple slower paced life with time to cook things, grow things and make things.
We spend far too much money on things that we don’t really want or need and too little time is spent on doing things that we enjoy. I like being creative and I like saving money so it’s time to get started. It’s ironic, when the children were all small and we didn’t have much money we did make and do a lot of things ourselves. We never grew anything though, that is something new for us.
One of the new blogs that I have found is Bean Sprouts; I mentioned it in an earlier blog. That lady has some wonderful ideas and her blog goes back to 2006. I am slowly reading my way right through it, she is that good.
In a posting in December 2007 she set a challenge which was for people to calculate their hourly pay, after tax and other non-avoidable outgoings. Her point was that if you knew how much that rate was, then you could work out how many hours pay anything you want to purchase would cost you. So let’s say you want a Kenwood Chef as I did. The cost is £400; the hourly rate that you bring home is £10 (I’m keeping the math simple here!) The true cost of that shiny new Kenwood is 40 hours, just over the average working week.
With that information you can work out just how much you really want it. Would you work 40 hours just to pay for that item? You can also work out how much you need to use it to make it a worthwhile purchase. In the case of my Kenwood you could go a step further and work out how much money you can save by making more dishes from scratch and then work out how long it would take to pay for it from the money saved.
I’m not suggesting that you do this with everything, just that it may be a valuable exercise which stops you buying things you don’t really need just on a whim.
Melanie, that’s the Bean Sprout lady, has a couple of quotes in her article which are worth posting here as they made me think. The first comes from a letter in The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn that illustrates what I mean:
...I went into the boys' rooms and made lists of last year's gifts (those that were still around), writing down the cost of each and estimating the time each had been played with. Some (jigsaw puzzles and board games) proved to have been good buys. Unfortunately, in other cases, my estimates showed that my husband had worked more hours to pay for a toy than my children had played with it!
The 2nd quote that Melanie shares is from an article on Festival of Frugality. The author of the quote is describing his feelings about finally buying his dream car, a Mercedes convertible:
It’s spectacular. It’s better than sex the first week.
It’s better than a meal at a great restaurant the second week.
It’s pretty damn good the third week.
And after that it’s just your car.
That second quote struck a chord with me. How often do we buy something that we think we desperately need, or we desperately want, only for the novelty to wear off after a few weeks? Don’t know what I’m going on about? Everything you buy always gives you great pleasure and satisfaction? Well that’s great you must have buying all sorted out.
On the other hand if like me some of this strikes a chord for you then, remember your hourly pay, and ask yourself before buying something - just how much pleasure is this going to give me? Is it really worth ten hours at work (or 40 or whatever)? Or could I spend this money better?
If you are like me and becoming interested in other ways of living and doing things that help to save not just money but maybe our planet too, then get yourself over to Melanies place where there is an absolute wealth of information. Her blog is so good that she has been featured in the Observer, the Guardian, the Scotsman, Times Online and Delicious magazine.
If I am missing in action for the next day or so it is probably because I am still working my way backwards through this blog! I am also checking out a lot of the links and some of them are really good so I may post some links soon.
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