Say you were unemployed. You’re watching your expenses, maximizing your trips out with the car to take advantage of being out and watching your gas use, being responsible in general. But like most people, you have a vice…or two. When do you cut those? Do you cut those?? What qualifies as a vice? One could argue that having a fast tier of internet speed is a vice.
One thing I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about is expenses. Cutting back where we can in order to have what money we do have saved, last as long as it can. In the back of my mind, I’ve also known there are a couple of *personal* expenses I have. Yeah…yeah…vices that I have which I could easily cut back. The thing is part of me doesn’t want to cut back on them because well, I enjoy them! The responsible side of me knows I need to cut back, at some point. Nicole has jumped in with both feet and cancelled her monthly box subscriptions. Darn it! That would have made me feel a bit better about keeping my vices.
For the record my two vices are alcohol and ammo. Typical American eh! I like my beer, there’s no doubt. The ammo, I haven’t really bought in quite a while. But I still look for a particular round whenever I’m at Walmart. While I don’t buy often, when they do have it in stock I load up.
What vices do you have which would be hard to part with if you had to stop??
Joe-
If we were really trying to cut expenses down, we’d stop eating out completely, I’d stop drinking at Girls Night every Thursday and hosting a liquor party every couple of months, we’d cancel cable again (even though we are only paying for a third of it since the roommates cover the rest), we’d stop going out to our favorite club, and we wouldn’t book our 1-2 vacations a year (usually cruises). We’d mainly go back to board gaming, YouTube, Netflix, and Redbox as our main forms of entertainment.
That’s one thing that will hurt a little for now, trips. We only took what I would call a big vacation every 5 years or so. But we would take several long weekends throughout the year, trips we can reach within a days’ drive. Those will be on hold for now.
Pretty quickly after the “news” we looked at expenses and began cutting back. We’re in the process of cutting back the monthly expenses such as cable (that will be gone in a couple weeks) as well as switching our wireless carrier. Those along will save a good amount every month.
We pretty much eliminated our eating out as well. Since the “news” – three weeks now – we’ve eaten out once and we were sure to keep it reasonable at $21 for three of us. With eating out we’re trying to use reward points for the occasional splurge. This way it feels like a treat without coming out of our regular income.
We didn’t typically get out much with friends, so the drinking out part was pretty easy to cut. I’m going to have to watch my home consumption. ; )
We’re also maximizing our trips out of the house to save on gas. We try to get all or most of our grocery shopping done with one trip.