How much life energy did you spend on that TV?
The
next step in the Financial Integrity process is to keep track of all of
your expenditures for a month. Now sum up the expenditures in
categories and divide each one by your real hourly wage.
This can
be a bit of an eye-opening experience for many people because money is
an abstract for most of us. We often don't realize that the $500
plasma screen TV we bought on a whim last month actually represented 45
hours of work --- that's a solid week of full time employment!
This exercise alone is probably enough to tempt many people to cut back
drasticly on their spending.
On the other hand, dyed
in the wool skinflints like me sometimes come
to another realization. I simply don't believe in spending money
on non-essentials (something Mark has worked hard to train me out of),
and this step helped me realize that a few luxuries really are
worth it. I defnitely don't mind working for an hour to get to
enjoy a meal with my family at a restaurant now and then, or to get a
whole month of entertainment through netflix. After reading Your
Money or Your Life,
I finally made peace with spending a bit of money on luxuries.
Whichever end of the
spendthrift/skinflint spectrum you stand on, this
step is definitely worth your while. Try it out and watch your
spending habits change.
| This post is part of our Your Money or Your Life lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I was pondering how this step would work for folks on disability or retiring on social security, and I didn't come up with a very good answer. The book says that folks who are retired should use their real hourly wage from the last job they held, but that doesn't ring true to me. Instead, I think that, in your case, I'd use the Barbara's real hourly wage, divided by two (figuring that you spend about as much time keeping the household running as she does working at the college.)
An alternative way of looking at it is that people like you are outside the system, and your money doesn't actual have any bearing on work time anymore. Instead, everything you do is volunteering, where presumably the returns on your labor are measured in satisfaction, not money.