Kninja Knitter

This week I have been devoting a little more time into reviewing my spending habits. Talk about an eye-opener!

Since the end of December, I’ve been using the Mint app to track my cash flow and monitor the breakdown of my spending habits. This practice is long overdue. In some respects I might blame my parents for failing to provide me with positive modeling of money management. More accurately, however, they provided no demonstration of money management practices when I was growing up. And in my adult years, I learned more and more about how little they did in this arena.

After my father passed away, I stepped in to help my mother to ensure she could subsist on the reduced income. When I brought up the topic of budgeting, her response was “Your father’s definition of a budget was a dream.” Perhaps because it didn’t exist in his process of handling money. Instead, it was money come in and went out, much like the tide. And the only steps they took to manage expenses was to shop sales, refuse to pay full price unless absolutely necessary, and buy store brands as a general rule.

While I’d like to think I was in a better position by having a documented budget, the reality was I didn’t have a complete budget. Instead, I managed to stay just ahead of things by managing core expenses (utilities, debts, regular bills). But I had a somewhat laissez faire attitude about random expenditures like dining out, all shopping, and various miscellaneous purchases. Pretty much anything I put on a credit card (except when I used the card to pay monthly bills) I didn’t track or keep an eye on.

Mint does a nice job in their app showing how spending compares month over month. And they have a simple graph showing expenses over a few months. I don’t know yet if there’s a limit to the timeline in the app or not, so I went back to my bank data to see how my Q1 spending compares to last year.

Last year’s Q1 was a little different than this year’s for a few reasons. Still, it was quite an eye-opener to look critically at where my money went and how much went out compared to how much came in. In January 2021, for example, more went out than came in. February was a big positive thanks to my annual bonus and my refund from the IRS. March, meanwhile, only ended up in the black because of the first COVID relief payment. Gulp.

In those first three month last year I spent nearly a grand just on knitting supplies (yarn, patterns, misc), and my shopping outlay was truly obscene. I thought nothing of spending a few hundred dollars on silly computer game bonuses. I’m terribly ashamed to see how irresponsible I was for doing much of the same behaviors I criticized my mother for. And I justified my indiscriminate spending choices because I got that bonus as well as a small raise. Plus that COVID relief money. That first check funded the purchase of a new guitar – while it was something I could use, and I’ve absolutely loved having it, it definitely wasn’t a necessity. It wasn’t even essential for my mental health, though it ultimately gave me a nice boost in that department.

It’s only too late to start making changes when you’re dead. So it’s certainly better that I shift my mindset and habits now when I can recognize and reap the benefits of the adjustments. I’ve set some small short-term goals to set aside savings and live more simply. One key driver for a number of the changes I’ve made this year is to ultimately relieve my son of certain burdens when I eventually die. I don’t want him to have to deal with eliminating piles on piles of stuff the way we had to after my mother passed. And I think he’d appreciate a nest egg as some consolation, too. Fortunately there was a little bit of money left over after settling my mother’s affairs, which was split among my brothers and me, though it was just a portion of a couple life insurance benefits for her and our dad.

Of course I also have no plans of dying anytime soon. The efforts I’m making to improve my physical health should allow me a longer lifespan than my parents, who died at ages 85 and 82. And as my body improves, my mind is also in a better place. As I clear the clutter from my house and eliminate silly excess in my spending, the new habits improve my overall health as well. So here’s to a better year ahead along with my goal of #FitterFifties!

Knit on.