A piece of junk mail triggered a long conversation about motivation and people in general last night and my husband and I disagreed on what is normal - and so a poll to resolve the question!
Not that I’m saying SD posters are normal, I would never insult you that way.
One of us believes that there will be almost no votes for option 4, and that the people who are in that category today are there only temporarily. I will reveal who after the poll results 
Poll coming!
My idea of ‘significant expense’ will vary wildly from a double-income middle management family, but yes, I am planning for something that is not chump change to my income.
We are in the process of making a land purchase, so I picked 1. But, if we weren’t planning that and we recieved an unexpected windfall, we would pay off some debt we have lying around, rather than putting it in savings.
I just bought some great outdoor furniture I have been drooling over for a few years. It won’t be delivered until next spring, but I am glad it has been purchased, finally.
I am planning on a trip to Brazil in 2012, that’s the next great expense.
If money dropped into my lap, there are a few things I have in mind.
That was actually why I didn’t include dollar figures. The question is around motivation and if people are usually striving for the next thing in their life. It could be practical or frivolous, the type of purchase doesn’t really impact the motivation.
IVF. Quite costly.
Yup - Jim has decided that this is the summer to buy his MidlifeCrisisMobile.
I answered the first three:
We are looking at possibly buying a house or duplex, likely sometime in the next year.
We just bought a new car to replace my husband’s lemon.
I will likely replace my car in the next 6-12 months, depending largely on whether we get a house and on my income/etc. I also want a new TV, I’ll need new clothes for work, and a bunch of other stuff
We are saving to redo our bathroom (well, I am, my husband does not get involved in the finances). First, I want to pay off our car loan, though so it’s going to be awhile.
Small - my Ipod is on its way out, and I will need to purchase a new one. I also want a new bike, but that may wait.
Large - I plan to buy a car.
Really big - a house in the next ten years or so.
I’ve been getting into a pattern of saving a ton of money (ok like $10k which is a ton to many) then blowing it on something for my house.
Last year it was 2 years worth of savings for a deck, a tractor and a shed.
This year I want to get my ditch enclosed and get a new driveway.
After this, I want to save up to get a home energy inspection + whatever they suggest to save energy.
And after that, I’ll be saving for about 5 years to get a new addition built.
I am banking on dying early and not needing retirement money. :-o
Well, I did check off item 4.
Our cars are both relatively new. We have no plans to move to another house. So there’s really nothing big that we’re currently planning for. Sure we are thinking about taking some trips that might cost a few thousand dollars in total, but to me that doesn’t count as a major expense.
Earlier this year I received a bonus of about $23k and most of it did, in fact, go straight to savings.
If we did get a windfall, my husband and I would likely disagree on how to spend it, so it might very well stay in the savings account a while. We’ve been talking for quite a while about new bedroom furniture, because our dog is taking up too much mattress space these days.
My husband wants to replace my car just because it’s old, I want to drive it until the wheels fall off.
One thing we might really do is take a trip to Alaska. It’s on Mr. Beetle’s bucket list. We talked about it a lot a few months ago, thinking we’d go this year, but the more I read about it, the more I wanted to hold back until we’d planned it more. It’s like another planet compared to anywhere we’ve ever been before, and Mr. Beetle has great faith that everything would work out just fine, but it seems to me that underestimating the great state of Alaska could get your ass killed.
Well, it could.
IN 2014 my youngest will have just graduated from High School and my oldest from college, and I want to take them to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
I’m also glad that a money amount was not tied to “significant” because that is so fluid among dopers.
We have an annual trek to Atlanta every September that is a big ticket expense to my budget. And I plan a charity event in October that usually costs me out of pocket in advance.
My mom has been getting some old, non-sentimental family jewelry ready for appraisal and selling. She’s going to split the proceeds three ways between herself, my sister and me. I plan to use my share for tuition (graduate certificate) and chin lipo, because my round jaw makes me look a lot heavier than I am. I feel that it’s only right to fund the procedure with money from inherited jewelry as my chin is an inherited trait!
3 weeks in southern France in August (not the same towns I visited in '09).
Not sure how to answer. We are saving/planning for retirement, including moving to a more expensive house. If a lot of money fell into my lap ($500k+), I might buy the new house now and have it as a vacation home for the next few years, but I am not saving for a vacation home. Short of that, I would just dump extra money into savings.
We are having a baby in October, so that’s a big thing that involves a long list of things we need to buy and a lot of savings, and we are taking a nine day working vacation in July (husband has a conference), and that required a lot of savings.
That said, just because we have specific plans about things we want to buy does not mean that as soon as we have enough money to buy those things, we go for it, or that all of our savings are earmarked for specific things: we do have (and very much enjoy having) a large slush fund against future emergencies. So if we got a big windfall, it would just go into savings: we have a list of serious purchases for the future, but already have a timetable for getting those things and we know how we are getting them. We wouldn’t accelerate the program.
We are in desperate need for both a new (used) car (preferably an older Honda, Toyota, or Subaru - something that can handle a decent amount of mileage and still be damned reliable) and for a new central air conditioning compressor. As both of these are in the $4000 - 5000 range (at least), we’ll have to get them one at a time, starting in the fall, which is when we’ll receive our first injection of that kind of money. Because it absolutely sucks sweaty grandma teat having one vehicle and living in a house without air conditioning in this ungodly heat.