First thing I thought of was ** shoes.** and a good bra.
When your feet and tits are happy & well supported, you are happy.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
You are so off the Ujest Family Annual Mooch Off The Friends and Family Travel Program. You don’t know what you are missing. My humor accompanied by my husbands insta-repairo talents on whatever is ailing in your house and car and what your husband will never get too on his Honey-do list ever. I know, my Honey-do list is older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Really, people love having us come over. I get to travel cheap and he gets to do what he likes to do best: Fix things and yammer on with another guy about sports and manly things.
OH and our kids are kinda cute, too.
My bad, then: I didn’t realize that you could buy stuff from Amazon without one. I know my question came across harsher than I meant it. Sorry! The credit card thing came immediately to mind when I read your post, but you’d mentioned buying books at Amazon and I didn’t know you could do that without a credit card. Ignorance fought. 
I’m profoundly jealous: I can’t find a good bra! 
I have DSL. Does anyone think that a luxury? Even my parents have that, even though their computer dates back to the early Pleistocene.
I eat out a lot, as in almost every meal.
I buy three or four books a week. They’re piled on every level surface in my house since I have no book cases.
I won’t buy cheap-ass auto parts for my cars. It irritates me that people think I should replace the water pump on my car, which lasted one hundred thirty thousand miles with a P.O.S. part from autozone, rather than spend twice as much for a new O.E. water pump. Why would I want to wear myself out replacing the part with a “lifetime” warranty over and over again.
Remember that people who buy the cheapest know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
To answer a lot of people, my family in Miami (where I was living until the end of November) still has dial-up access (through AOL, no less), and they refuse to change. I’ve even found dial-up services that are cheaper than AOL, such as Netscape and NetZero, and my Dad won’t switch. I’ve found them good deals on DSL, but no dice. Our house was burglarized and vandalized a few years back, and my mom now refuses to have any workmen come to the house for anything–she’s convinced that getting high-speed internet will require workmen coming over to install stuff, and won’t allow it. I’ve tried to tell them they can get the equipment in the mail and my brother can set it up, but they don’t buy it. Meanwhile, my mom and my brother are each running 4-year-old Dells with Windows ME and Celeron processors, and sharing an AOL account. I’m so glad I got a job and moved out!
This is likely a hijack (my bad) but I’m wondering: everyone who realizes they are paying for a luxury version of whatever – are you carrying credit card balances? Do you have outstanding education loans? Do you have a six-months-living-expenses emergency fund in the bank? Do you have health and life (if you have dependents) and disability insurance?
Because to my mind there’s a BIG difference between having your ducks all in a line and then enjoying ‘excess’ money however you please AND being in the situation of so many Americans, that is, one accident/layoff/illness away from losing your current lifestyle and ‘wasting’ money instead of building financial security.
Well, no. But then again I don’t blow money left and right either.
As for satisfying my A/C jones: I cut back in other areas so I can stay cool and comfortable at home. I drive a worn-out, piece of shit, $500 car (that gets 45MPG) so I can afford to pay a higher electric bill. No big whoop.
I think most of the contributors to this thread will tell you that they cut back in other areas in order to afford their “extravagances.”
I’m not opposed to staying with friends while traveling. “Staying with friends in their home” is not the same thing as “finding crash space.” I am opposed to “crashing” on someone’s floor, having to wait until everyone feels like going to bed before I can go to sleep, sharing a bathroom with possibly an entire family - who I might not even know (if they are my traveling companion’s friends) - when all the while I can afford a hotel.
Perhaps I am getting too militant about this because the subject brings to mind a former boyfriend, who was very into traveling and “crashing” wherever. He wanted to go to the UK and crash on people’s floors - in their tiny London flats, some without their own bathrooms - instead of paying for a hotel. He wanted to go to Hawaii and crash on the beach. He wanted to go the Cape and crash in his van, use the public toilets at the parking lot, or a sand dune, and “bathe” in the ocean. He wanted to stay in a hostel - at 44 years old! - even though we would not be able to sleep together, just to save a few bucks. I AM NOT going on vacation to save money! If I want to save, I will stay home. The whole concept of making oneself uncomfortable in order to save money, when you have CHOSEN to go on a trip that costs money, is very weird to me.
Staying with friends is perfectly fine, great even, as long as they have room. Sleeping on a floor is not great.
I have outstanding loans on the car, the kitchen, the house, and a student loan.
I’ve never paid a cent of interest or a late fee in the 15 years I’ve had a credit card.
I have money in the bank and the stock market.
I could pay off the kitchen and the student loans very quickly if I wanted. I wrestle with whether I should leave the money in the market or pay them off faster.
We’d been wanting to remodel the bathroom for years, and I had to say, “no bathroom until we pay for it with cash.”
I have health insurance.
Mine are A/C in the summertime (usually mid-May to Mid-October), high-speed internet access (I currently have a cable modem), and my two TiVos are my main extravagances…
I learned my lesson many years ago about carrying credit-card balances. I now pay them off every month, or I don’t use them.
Good pens. I can’t write with a ball point. I love fountain pens, and I love ink tanks. None of my pens write in the same color.
My bicycle. It’s not outlandishly expensive, but I’m a grad student so it was expensive for me. I pay for good parts and good tune-ups.
I do have some luxuries. Namely I will not buy anything but top shelf liquor, I do have the high speed internet that nobody around here finds a luxury, I have a Netflix account, and I have more ties for work than I really know what to do with just because I like variety.
But, I trade off. The top shelf liquor is only for maybe a drink or two per week for any given spirit. So that 750mil bottle lasts me 3 months. Internet is bundled with phone service for a reduced rate. Netflix is in lieu of cable tv, which would cost more and I’d use less. The ties, I really can’t justify. I just like color.
On other fronts, I’m starting to brown-bag my lunch more, after realizing that daily deli costs were just too high. I can slap a sandwich together and throw some chips in a bag with no effort, and while handling various other tasks. I actually felt wasteful today getting my first coffee out since starting the budgeting, for a killer two buck a week habit.
To answer Starving’s question, I do have student loans (who doesn’t nowadays? especially only a year out of graduation?), which I dutifully pay every month. It’s rare that I carry a credit balance month to month, typically paying in full each bill (maybe one in three months sees a carryover). Six months safety net? No, but I can probably swing about two on my own with little to no lasting debt, and I have enough of a family and friend network to help me out more if something truly catastrophic happened. Insurance is covered through work, and I just don’t even look at what it takes off my gross (not much, though, since I got a cheaper dedicated provider plan); my paycheck is my net, and I refuse to look at it any other way.
I hope I’m not the only person here who read that as “Penis” originally. :eek:
Our cats get the highest quality cat food, too. They depend on us completely for their food; we can choose to eat McDonald’s once in a while if we like, but we wouldn’t like a steady diet of it, and I consider cheap pet food the equivalent of human junk food.
Toilet paper, Kleenex, and cheese.
These are the three things on which there can BE no compromise.
I don’t pay for that, either. 
I’m amazed at the number of people on here who don’t think twice about the amount of energy you’re wasting by leaving the temperature control on 24/7. I mean, even when you’re not there? No wonder the US has the world’s biggest ecological footprint.
Me, I don’t scrimp on shoes or jeans. I buy quality clothes, but 90% of the time they are on sale.
Thinking it over after posting, I think the tone of post (about whether your financial situation is secure) seems more censorious than I meant. A few years back I read “Your Money or Your Life” and it had a great impact on me, and how being financially secure could free you from so many worries AND open up possibilities you can follow when you aren’t stuck on a ‘every single dollar is needed or we sink’ treadmill.
Of course you should have some ‘luxuries’ in your life, luxuries defined as ‘things that make you feel good even if they aren’t bare necessities.’ You shouldn’t wait until you’ve got a million dollar investment fun before you enjoy a first run movie or a bottle of your favorite perfume,
It’s just that I have in my immediate family an example of the “nothing but the best is good enough” mentality carried to extremes. My brother and his wife, to be exact. He was making good money, and they spent every dime as it came in and borrowed against the future.
Buy a house that was ‘just’ a few hundreds per month more than they could really afford? Sure, why not? Bound to be getting a raise, right? And who cares if the existing carpets are in good condition, they weren’t exactly what they would have chosen, so get them ripped out and replaced. ALL of them, hey, saves upset in having the workmen there only one time, right? And why shouldn’t wife have brand new top of the line furniture sets for all the rooms? “Sure they’re expensive,” she said, “but they’ll last for decades and figured per year they’re cheap.”
And on and on. The best booze for their parties. A new patio. Household help because the wife didn’t like doing cleaning – even though she had no job and no kids to take care of. I guess the weekly standing appointments for haircare and manicures and tennis lessons ate up all her time.
You get the picture, right?
Then the company my brother worked for failed. At the same time a whole bunch of other high tech places were cutting back on employees if not collapsing entirely. Within three weeks they were begging us for a loan (and my hubby and my salaries combined are significantly less than my brother’s was) to pay their outsized mortgage.
Yes, they didn’t have enough money in the bank to last a single month!
All their existing credit balances were about maxed, and no one gives more credit to the unemployed. They had a pretty grim time of it for about 8 months. But did my grasshopper of a brother learn from it? Hell, no. I was at their house a few weeks ago, and while my SIL was telling me about the upgraded leather upholstery they had just ordered for their new car, she answered the phone – yup, being dunned because of an overdue credit card bill…
Well, as a matter of fact…
I have zero credit card debt, my student loans were paid off over 10 years ago, and I have health, life AND disability insurance.
No, I do not have six months living expenses - because I recently dipped into it when I took unpaid leave from work to care for my hospitalized parents. But I’ll be back to the six months level in about another month.
Good wine, good scotch. I have paid almost $80 for a single bottle of wine. Damn, was it worth it. I recently bought a special release of Lagavulin. Very very nice.
The next time I buy a suit, I’m getting one tailor-made. Shirts too. I have long arms for my height and nothing off the rack really fits right. If it fits my arms it’s too long in the waist and usually a bit big around the shoulders too. Screw pre-made suits. I don’t care if it’s an Armani, it probably won’t fit right.
Books. I binge every couple of months.
If I could, I’d add swords to this list. I live in Japan, so I can’t buy this, one of these, or even this. I have a couple of cheaper swords stored with a friend back in the US that I bought when I was younger and not as knowledgeable about swords. My best is not as good as the worst of these that I now covet.
You have to have special permits to import so much as a kitchen knife into Japan. Ironically, this extends even to swords that were originally made in Japan. Katana made in Japan can be bought here but cannot leave the country, or they’re subject to the same ban on the importation of weapons. If I buy one here, it has to stay here if I want to have it available in Japan.
I do have an iai-tô that I bought for practicing iai and ken-jutsu. It’s a blunt practice sword made from hardened aluminum with close to the same weight and balance as a steel blade. Mine looks similar to this with a longer tsuka and different tsuka-maki. Since I chose all the fittings and had to get a longer blade than the norm it cost me about US$580. Most people would consider that extravagant for a piece of practice equipment. It’s beautiful and will probably last longer than my body will. Worth every yen.
I too love a good pen and have stacks of books on the sooner or later I’ll read them pile.
The amount and quality of tools in my workshop have made people gasp. I have collected some antique tools I’ll never use but are beautiful to look at and admire the craftsmanship. Some say me never using them is a waste, they are obsolete. Machinist items for things that can be done so much faster and easier with modern things. The carpentry stuff has largely been taken out with power tools. For example I can use a plane but will use a sander 9 times out of 10.
My paintball gear is getting out of control. More of an active hobby than an extragavance.
The thing that’s hard to justify is the $500+ motorcycle jacket. Totally waterproof so far and the removable electric fleece liner is oh so wonderful after dark. 300 something on kangroo hide gloves is a little much too.
I’ve said many times, this is why I work. If I only needed to eat and pay the utilities I’d have a part time job. Oh and life’s too short for cheap beer.