personal growth

You Can’t Take it With You: Spending Money in my 30s

Juli

Spending money?
Say what?

spending money in my 30s

I’m usually all about saving money, but I think in some small ways I’m starting to change my tune.

I’ve been straight up miserly since childhood – I was the kid with several piggy banks stuffed full, who never spent my birthday money on anything.

I had so much cash that in high school I became the go-to friend for a loan.  And I didn’t mind at all.

In college, I rode a skateboard to work because I didn’t own a car. I stretched restaurant gift cards by ordering nothing but muffins and tea.  I made my friends all birthday cakes, with 88 cent mixes and a 50 cent can of soda.

When we first got married, I could make dinner for four adults with a single chicken breast and Knorr Pasta Side.  No exaggeration.

Pre-owned clothing.  Pre-owned furniture.  Flipping a house.  Craigslisting.  Putting off car repairs.  You name it, we do it super frugally.

But today, I spent $30 on Christmas wrapping supplies, and I realized something.

We have been so careful with our money, for so long, that we deserve to spend a little of it on making our lives easier.

My husband got a sort-of promotion this year (he went from teacher to principal, but not the fancy kind of well-paid principal) and so far we haven’t really taken advantage of that whatsoever.  We’ve been saving up for a big vacation next year for five years, and we have some home remodeling we’ve budgeted for, but our day-to-day spending remains super tight-fisted.

Until I stopped in the Christmas aisles of the store today, and bought the first wrapping paper I liked, and the fancy name tags, and the nice ribbon.  Most years, I wait until I can get to the bigger store (an hour away) with the BIG rolls of INEXPENSIVE wrapping paper, and spend hours DIYing decorations and tags for the packages.  It takes forever.  I enjoy it at the beginning but then it majorly stresses me out.  So this year, I just paid for the fancy stuff right now, in early November, and can leisurely wrap my presents at will.

Definitely worth $30.

There are other things I’ve recently decided are worth the money or cupboard space after years of refusing them.

A griddle.  I always felt like owning an electric griddle was a kitchen-space extravagance; after all, can’t I just use a pan on the stove.
But I’ve got a pretty large family now, and making pancakes two at a time in a pan was taking more time than it was worth.  I asked for a griddle as a gift (a practical one – it flips over to become an indoor grill) and have used it multiple times already in only a couple weeks.

Good pens.  Sure, I could stick it out with the free or very-inexpensive ballpoint pens, but I do a lot of handwriting and every single time I touch a ballpoint to paper I’m irritated.  (I have a problem.)  Flair pens, always, regardless of the extra $.

Better hangers.  YEARS of slipping clothes, followed by years of breaking hangers, and I’ve finally landed on all-one-piece metal hangers coated in something.  Worth the extra.
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Essentially, if I use it every day and it’s not too extravagant, or if it will save me serious stress and effort, it has become worth it to me.  After all, I’ve spent 25 years being careful with my money – and you can’t take it with you.

Reflecting: Making Tortillas

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The other night for dinner, I decided to make homemade tortillas.
That sounds uninspiring, maybe.
I remember when I first “learned” to make tortillas.  I use some quotes there because my attempts were awful.  But I “learned” to make them during our first year of marriage.
(A little background: We got married at 21 and were both full-time in private college for an additional three semesters.  Picture a historic, falling-apart apartment above a crafts&gifts store, with no internet and a leaky kitchen ceiling.  And heat controlled by the city, in Minnesota.)
Back then, I made homemade tortillas because we were, frankly, broke.
I had no aspirations of being a homemaker.  I didn’t even think I wanted children, and I certainly had no interest in giving up my (future) career.
But honestly, most of our groceries came from a food bank run by volunteer ladies in our college’s basement.  God bless those ladies, and the people who sent donated food.  We ate well, considering: cereal for breakfast, ramen noodles and bagged pasta sides and farm fresh eggs.
But I was determined that we would have tacos.
Tacos were a very important food to my (new) husband.  His family had big taco feasts when he was growing up – lots of chopping and grating and heating up in preparation for a big spread around a huge oval table with lots of siblings, nephews, significant others.  I had experienced these family taco dinners firsthand, and I knew how much he loved the whole atmosphere.
If we were to have tacos, those tortillas had to be free.  And free meant making them myself, with flour and oil from the food bank.
I remember investing $3 in a crappy grocery-store rolling pin to make my husband a pie on his first married birthday.
I remember taking our iPod touch down to the local coffee shop to get some WiFi, to look for a recipe for tortillas.  Then writing it down to bring home, because the iPod wouldn’t save webpages.
I remember them tasting like oily flour, and being strangely transparent, and way too thick to actually roll into a taco.
I remember my sense of accomplishment at having made a family taco feast out of nothing but sweat and stubbornness.
Then my thoughts turned to more recent years, where our financial state has been more secure.
Years where I never gave a second thought to store-bought tortillas, where I had the luxury of being picky about the percentage of my ground beef, where my complaints about taco feasts mounted because “I didn’t feel like washing up all those dishes” or “it was too much chopping to bother with.”
And here I was, in my beautiful new kitchen, stepping around my toddlers, scattering flour everywhere, making tortillas.  Almost a decade after that first time.  A completely different woman, a completely different wife, living in a way I would have never imagined back in that leaky kitchen as a college student.
Making tortillas because I thought it would be a fun culinary adventure.  Because I could.
 
And they turned out beautifully.
What I mean to say, friends, is these tortillas remind me of how blessed I have been in my adult life.
And of a time when I put significant effort into homemaking without even realizing it.
And that now that I have the luxury of time and money, how much more should I work toward creating that “taco feast” kind of atmosphere.
Grace.

 

Let Go of Mom Guilt: Capturing Memories

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Mom guilt takes up residence in all kinds of sneaky places.  Let’s address one of those today.

I am never here to mom-bash, so I am definitely not linking to this or mentioning usernames.  While meandering on Pinterest, I saw a pin about mom checklists, specifically “Can’t Miss Photos of the Month.”
There were something like 50 photo opportunities listed here!  If this were a list for the whole year, it might be conceivable.  Being a checklist of 50 photos you “can’t miss” of your kids each MONTH means 90% of people pinning that are going to fail, miserably.  And with that idealism + failure equation, mom guilt sets in.

Do you have a handful of pictures of each kid each year?  You’re doing fine.  (Bonus points if YOU are in any of them!)

I had a looming fear when I had a second child that I wouldn’t take “enough” pictures of him.  Whatever “enough” means.  I love taking pictures, and I had taken a plethora of my oldest because he was so stinkin’ adorable all the time.  Probably ridiculous, but one of my biggest concerns about adding a second child was that they wouldn’t feel as special because I wouldn’t focus solely on them – wouldn’t take as many pictures.  That there would be digital and print evidence that I “loved the older one more.”

After child #2 being on the planet for a full year, let me tell you.  There are just as many pictures.  In fact, I upgraded to a smart phone recently so there are actually BETTER pictures this time around.  Gasp.  There are so many sweet moments between the two boys that I take photos on an almost-daily basis.

I have my own checklist – make sure I take a photo the day a child joins our family, and on each birthday.  Sometimes I remember to take one on “firsts.”
But about “firsts.”  I have learned this – it is far more important to be engaged, present, actually watching the firsts, than it is to be taking photos or videos.  In 20 years, it might be fun for your child to page through photos of their firsts.  It might impress or entertain some relatives or a future child-in-law.  But really, those firsts are the most important to you as their parent.  And what you hold most dear will be a strong memory of having actually witnessed this event, not a sterile photo of it taking place.

While we’re on this topic, let me address scrapbooks.  If this is a hobby of yours, wonderful!  Go forth and craft.  If it’s not, let it go!  Remember our moms’ photo books of yesteryear?  There were some pictures with names or dates scrawled on maybe half of them, jammed into photo albums.  Done.  And our lives weren’t any less rich for it.

Maybe a lesser guilt: printing physical photos.  This is one I feel distinctly, as a natural cynic.  I assume that the internet is going to fail me at some point in the future, and my photos backed up in the mysterious “cloud” will disappear.  And then who will get to see all the badly-timed smartphone photos I took?!
I have decided to let go of that mom guilt by specifically printing photos once a year.  Around December, after everybody’s birthdays in November, I go on a spree one night and choose pictures to print.  I get them done “overnight” to our local-ish Walmart and pick them up the next day when I go to pick up my photo Christmas cards.  Sometimes some of them make it in an album.  Good enough.
I’m going to try photobooks this next year – supposedly I can use my Instagram and have them automatically curated and delivered to me.  Sounds wonderful!

Be present with your kids.  Put down the camera/phone.  Watch and encourage and feel.

That sense of family created by memories is what you’re really after.  Photographic evidence that it existed is just extra.

Bringing Vacation Home

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Is there such a thing as an adult who does not enjoy vacation?
I went on a little New Years’ getaway with my husband and our best friends, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes vacation so wonderful, and how to incorporate some of that into my daily life.  I’ve come upon a few different concepts.

From our recent vacation – relaxing in the middle of nowhere.

Relaxing, minimalist environment
Think about what made the vacation so relaxing.  Was it that your space was clean?  That you were living with just a suitcase of possessions and no clutter?  Odds are good you were even living in a significantly smaller space than usual, possibly even with extra people, yet the hotel room/cabin/condo was relaxing.
This is great to replicate at home!  Living with fewer possessions naturally helps your space stay cleaner.  I will forever be indebted to the Kon Mari method of decluttering for making my home more peaceful and easier to keep picked up.  Consider a capsule wardrobe to replicate the limited options of a suitcase (and the ease of dressing that comes with it!)

Fresh linens
That may seem super small, but really.  When’s the last time you changed your sheets and washed your throw blankets and bleached your towels? (I keep white towels for this reason.)  Try it, and really pay attention to the sensation of sinking into fresh linens – savor it!  (By extension, all your nicely folded laundry in your suitcase?  Ey?) If you find this as valuable as I do, plan it into your housekeeping!

Pre-planned activities
Now, this is probably personal preference,  but I usually  have some pre-planned activities on vacation.  On this recent vacation, we brought along decks of cards to play our favorite game, one board game the husbands specifically like, and books and facemasks for the wives.  Nothing fancy, nothing that involved leaving the couch.  The aspect of this that makes the day so enjoyable is that there was no sitting around saying, “What should we do?  I dunno.  What do you want to do?  I dunno.”
Consider planning your leisure once you’re back home – would you like to read a book in the evenings? Journal in the mornings?  Have a family movie night?  I have actually taken to pre-planning my leisure activities for my miracle mornings and for my evenings after the kids go to bed, and it’s great.

Personal growth time
Like I said, this recent vacation included intentional book-reading.  For me, leisure reading is a part of self care and personal growth, because I truly love reading (like in the depths of my soul, love, reading.  #nerd)
Odds are good that during a vacation, you take more time for these kinds of activities.  Perhaps hiking is your personal growth.  Maybe meditating.  Some people probably experience personal growth by touring important landmarks or museums.  Whatever it is that feeds your spirit, you’ve probably made up your mind and planned to do it during your official vacation.
You should really do that kind of stuff during your regular days.  Seriously.

Moments of complete stillness
There are moments in vacation where absolutely nothing is going on.  Nothing is calling your attention.  Nothing needs to be cleaned or cooked or put away.  Those moments may be in an art gallery, in your hotel room in the wee hours, sitting on a beach kid-free, or doing a face mask on a couch while your husbands play a board game.
See if you can recreate those moments in your daily home life.  For me, those moments exist at 6:00 am (after my husband has left for work, my kids are still soundly asleep, and I’m alone in my office with a cup of coffee) but you can jam them anywhere.  On a commute using public transport, on a walk, etc.

Pick one thing to try – make your daily life more like a vacation.  Maybe commit to it for 2 weeks.  Write it down.  Plan it out. 
Share what you’re going to try or what you already do!

P.S. – we used Air BnB to book our vacation, and it worked like a charm!  I even got email copies of text messages sent by our host.  Recommend!
(Not sponsered.  I wish!)