Obnoxious money: Standard tricks for saving money lead to spending money when your hourly wage/salary is high

One of the standard tricks for saving money is to calculate how many hours of work it takes to pay for the luxury you’re thinking of spending. If eating lunch out is equivalent to two hours of work at the call center, you might decide to brown-bag it instead. (I never understood why so many of my coworkers ate out while on break at our minimum wage job when I was in high school.) Here’s becoming minimalist explaining how we don’t buy things with money, we buy them with time. A related technique is to translate those dollars into something tangible, here’s us talking about the candy bar exchange rate, though as grownups you’ll probably want to use something like cars or computers or weeks of groceries.

Another standard trick is to add up how much your latte factor (which could be any small regular luxury expense, not just lattes) is costing you over the course of a year. At $5/day for 5 days/week for 50 weeks/year, a latte factor could be $1250/year. Here’s the frugal girl discussing this technique in more detail.

The problem with these techniques when you’re making obnoxious amounts of money is that they lead to more spending.  If the cost eating out can be measured in minutes of work instead of hours, then it seems silly to not eat out.  The cost of DH’s recent rabies scare hit home with him when I told him that two emergency room visits = 1 new car, but if we were making more money, even that cost wouldn’t be a big deal– the comparison might be a small fraction of a nicer car or yacht or single private airplane ride.  At a certain point $1250/year seems like nothing– why wouldn’t one spend that on small luxuries?

… so… should we be spending more?  Laura Vanderkam from a few years ago would certainly say yes.  (I don’t know what she’s selling now.)  Use that hourly wage calculation to loosen up on spending, especially if it increases productivity or diminishes stress or saves time.

Indeed, recently I got a glasses exam out-of-network (probably)… $130 for the exam.  The insurance company didn’t make things easy for LensCrafters, so after trying to login to the stupid BC/BS page and being stymied by changing my password and then finally finding my benefits on the university website I discovered I’d only be reimbursed 50% anyway, I decided SCREW IT it’s not worth it.  Even if they should have reimbursed me $65, even for the principal of the thing (which was more important to me back when I had more time), I wasn’t willing to put more time and mental energy into it.

Here’s a tweet from an econ professor:

My shadow wage is sufficiently high that when I lose something in my house it's less costly to buy a replacement than spend hours looking for it

This is not environmentally responsible

Solutions?

— Prof Dynarski (@dynarski) April 2, 2019

Susan Dynarski makes $270,000.00 according to the UMichigan website (not as much as many of their other star professors!) and is in the 98% percentile of income for the US.  (I am again reminded of talking with professional colleagues whose families make about 2x Dr. Dynarski’s and how their view of what a vacation is or cleaning person’s duties are is so different from most of the upper middle class’s… when you make over 500K/year and it isn’t going to your mortgage, you have a personal assistant and you rent a chef to go with your Caribbean vacation and your cleaning person will put things away instead of refusing to clean if the house isn’t already uncluttered.  We’re not there.)  (In fairness to Prof. Dynarski, she’s a first-gen college student whose family was in the bottom income quartile growing up.  She’s not out-of-touch.  Even if the comments on that thread… economists, man.)

Is this rational?  Is this necessary?  Should people with higher wages be spending more based on these tricks?  Should we instead find our “enough” as recommended in YMoYL?

I don’t know.

What do you think?  And how do you feel about these kinds of spending tricks?

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Confused money feelings

This summer has been full of contrasting monetary feelings.

Last school year we were starting to feel pretty wealthy until we bought a car.  We have not yet completely refilled the emergency fund, but it is close.

Now this summer I’m not being paid because it is summer (disclaimer:  I will get some summer grant money, but closer to fall), so I see the check register balance (where his paycheck is deposited) going down each month instead of up.  Twice a month the balance goes up when DH gets his paycheck, but the end number is lower than it was a month prior because we spend more than his take-home pay.  So when I see that, I don’t feel rich and I start cutting back on spending or at least questioning purchases.  The Disney vacation also put a pretty big dent into our buffer, even though DH’s parents paid for Disney itself and housing.

Meanwhile DH still feels wealthy and keeps buying stuff without questioning as the household needs/wants it (things like electric toothbrushes or new ballasts for the kitchen light), and we *are* still wealthy and he doesn’t need to question about stuff like that.  But it’s weird how I have a hard time thinking about annual income instead of monthly income.

I’ve still been making myself donate to something #resist-worthy for each weekday I don’t get an action in.  If I don’t make my phonecalls or do some other real form of activism, then I have to find someplace to give $25 to.  Should that $25 feel like a real sacrifice or should it be a bagatelle?  I don’t know.

Maybe it’s good to have a 9 month salary because it causes me to reset my spending ideas each summer.  Or maybe we’re meant to be spending more (though we would seriously regret getting used to 2x my income if DH lost his job).

I don’t really know how to feel about money amounts this summer.

How are you feeling about your income/saving/spending balance right now?

How do you feel about obnoxious money posts?

I’m genuinely curious– how do the polite silent readers who want to remain anonymous or don’t want to log in feel about the obnoxious money posts?  (Also people who aren’t silent and/or don’t want to remain anonymous on this topic can chime in, as always!)

Obnoxious post: things that being rich (and high income) makes easier

As we’ve climbed up and fallen down the income distribution we’ve talked a lot about how things have changed.  Mostly they’ve been big things like not having to worry so much about stuff, being able to ignore (or being highly focused on) work pressures, being able to pay (or not) to make big problems go away, and then being able to pay (or not) even more to make problems go away.  Really, I enjoy the lack of fear, but that started at a much lower income than what we have now (though there’s definitely been diminished stress with more savings).

Here are some things that we’ve done since DH’s re-employment now that we’re high income for which I’m a bit surprised about how much I appreciate them.

• Forgetting to get a meal receipt for a conference trip (or losing it or laundering it) is not that big a deal– I can just not submit a receipt and pay for the meal myself.  $10 or even $20 is not going to break our budget, so to speak.
• TSA-PRE turns out to be pretty nice. I did not realize how much I would enjoy not taking my shoes off or taking my liquids bag out of my bag.  I’m sure I will feel the same way about not taking my laptop out next time.  These things are still true even when the TSA-Pre line is long.  It’s not just saving time like I’d thought but also decreasing hassle.  I put a lot of mental effort each time to getting everything out/off and back/on as quickly and efficiently as possible and now I no longer need to keep that mental space going.
• We’re finally getting a toll-tag for the city nearest us, even though we only go about once a month and even though we mainly only would ever use the toll-roads on the way to the airport.  There are some tolls that ONLY take the electronic pass so we can’t even stop and pay taxes when we’re in a hurry (though we can get a bill later including fees for law-breaking, ask me how I know), which means we were driving on the access roads which are crowded and stop-and-go.  Now we’ll be able to hop on the toll roads and just not care about the money part because the tolls aren’t high enough to matter for us.
• When I got to unexpectedly high shipping costs for a recent political thing (I bought a yard sign and t-shirt(!) for a state election), I just went, “meh, we can afford this” instead of taking it as a sign that I shouldn’t be purchasing.
• We flew out my MIL to watch the kids while we were both on work trips (using miles, so no frugal-card problems there).  DH for some reason decided he had to fly out of a city that doesn’t do an airport shuttle to our town, so he has to drive his car and park it at the airport.  After looking at the kids’ schedules and my schedule, I decided to spend $130 to rent a car for MIL for three days rather than having her drop me off and pick me up at work/airport/etc.  Now I can park my car at the (local tiny) airport super early and drive myself home without anybody having to bundle DC2 into the car.  And I don’t have to worry about explaining to her how you have to start braking waaaay in advance to get my car to stop, ditto acceleration and speeding up.  My MIL demurred at the expense, but honestly, $130 is just not that big a deal for not having to worry about things.  (There were a couple cheaper car rental options, but they had one star on yelp… another thing I didn’t want her to worry about.)
• We paid for valet parking at the restaurant where we took my sister out for her birthday instead of finding a (distant) lot that wasn’t full and walking.

I guess these come under two headings:  Things that reduce hassle for people with money and money mistakes I used to feel guilty about.

I suppose if I were Frugal Samurai I would be thinking about the things we can’t afford to do yet and using that as “proof” that we’re not rich.  (And it is true that we still couldn’t afford to buy a house in a decent school district out where he lives, even if we kept our current incomes.)  But I look at these luxuries and think wow, we can do this and it doesn’t really make a dent.  That’s amazing.  And man, you really can buy less stress, even in these little ways.  The world is set up to separate high income people from their money and to make life less pleasant for everyone else (except the current Government, which is set up to keep high income people high income while making life less pleasant for everyone else, possibly so that money can be siphoned off for private interests).  #resist

How does money make your life easier?

Thoughts on ways to become more obnoxious with money

I was reading through the Gourmet magazine cookbook I got for my birthday the other day (used because Gourmet is sadly defunct).  In the entertaining section it has a couple of pages recommending that when you throw a party, you just hire caterers and be sure to rent 3x the wine glasses you think you’ll need.  I guess not unexpected advice from a book that starts with 33 pages of cocktails*, though perhaps a bit unexpected from a cookbook that one has bought, presumably, to cook the recipes therein.  I’ve been to catered parties for work, but I’d never thought of actually throwing one myself.  In fact, other than Thanksgiving and the occasional playdate (either DC1 or DH will have a friend or two over to play boardgames, and/or in DC1’s case, video games), we really don’t throw parties at all.  That year in paradise we would have people over and we’d get take-out (usually dips and salads from the local Israeli place), which is sort of like catering, but much less expensive.  Here, presumably, we’d go into the city the weekend before throwing a party and get lots of frozen canapes from WF and TJ’s to reheat.

The military couple who owned our house before us set up the kitchen for caterers with lots of warming trays and heat lamps and an entire wall of our huge pantry filled with alcohol (the side where we keep tupperware, plastic cutlery, the mini fire extinguisher, extracts, and where the children keep their personal candy stashes).  So maybe catering is something that “normal” upper-middle-class people do, or more likely, they catered a lot of work events so someone else was paying.  The state-side military seems to be into government funded catering.

I wonder at what income/wealth point people hire personal assistants and if we will ever get there.  I’m guessing not.  (What would we use a personal assistant for, you ask?  This weekend we decided that finding a competent handi-person was too difficult so DH is in our back yard pressure-washing the deck himself and after it dries, 3/4 of us will work on staining it.  A good personal assistant would find a handi-person and negotiate a reasonable rate for hir services.  Similarly this PA would find a reasonable yard service that doesn’t have to be told every single week not to cut the grass so short, not to use leaf blowers, etc.  So, I guess a good PA would mainly find ways to spend more of our money.  I’m guessing we will never get to that point.)  I do know economics professors who have personal assistants, but they’re dual-economist couples at top schools who are jointly making somewhere around $500K/year (or more).  So, maybe the answer is $500K/year, adjusted for inflation?  Must be nice.

Is this why obnoxious people say you cannot possibly be rich in the Bay area on a mere 300K/year?  Because they can’t afford to live the life of movie stars from the 1930s?  Is this why the evil rich want more income inequality, so it’s easier to hire competent servants?

How could you become more obnoxious with (lots more) money?  Giving to charity or saving it not allowed for this thought exercise!  Hiring a toothpaste sommelier, on the other hand, is totally allowed.

*Two thumbs up for their Moscow mule.  Also the chocolate egg creme.

obnoxious ramblings on income, unearned income, taxes, and so on

• We made 17K (!) in non-W2 income last year.  Some of that was honorarium and consulting (1099) and some of that was dividends and unwanted capital gains (I really need to do *something* about American Century Trust and its irritating habit of creating capital gains which it then reinvests in itself.  It didn’t used to do that.  But now it does.  Just selling it all will create an unpleasant tax situation come tax time, but maybe I should bite the bullet.)
• I don’t know what the breakdown between stocks and 1099 income is because DH mentioned this to me while he was trying to figure out our estimated tax situation for next year.
• He told me that our estimated taxes for next year would be 17K and I almost had a heart attack.
• Then I was like, wait… that can’t be right.  What was our non-W2 income?  We can’t be paying 17K in taxes on 17K of estimated non-taxed income.
• Then I said, on top of that, I switched all our Roth 401K/457 stuff to traditional (even though I know that’s not the optimal money thing to do, it’s part of my #resisting), so we should be paying lower taxes on top of the fact that we’re in a lower tax bracket despite higher income because congressional Republicans and their oligarch overlords are evil.
• It turned out DH had not paid any attention to the fact that we put tax-free (for now) money into a required retirement fund (6% of my income), a 403(b), a 457, and as much of a 401K as DH’s non-discriminating test failing fund will allow.
• Taking that into account brought down our estimated excess tax burden to something like $6K.
• We decided to take $500 out of each of my 9 paychecks and also send the government a check for $1000.  (They also have a small credit from this year’s taxes because we’d missed a bunch of charitable giving the first time we went through taxes and paid the bill.  Correcting that mistake put us into itemizing range and we saved something like $100, which we applied to next year’s taxes.)
• Our dividend income may be lower next year because PG&E which provides the bulk of my dividend income is having money problems (specifically, they’re waiting to see how much they owe for the CA wildfires) and has not been paying out quarterly dividends.  That’s about $700/quarter we will not be getting.  This has happened before– when I first got these stocks PG&E was bankrupt (but I still had to pay taxes on money I never got with money didn’t have… long story, but the dividends since have made up for that stress).

What we decided to do with “all that extra money”

In the end, DH was a voice of reason and noted that we really don’t know how long his job is going to last (they have funding for ~2 years, but it’s touch and go after that, and the company owner is in his 70s and keeps putting off succession plans), and he would much rather have 10K in the stock market than a 10K vacation to Hawaii (or anywhere else).

That said, we did make a few changes:

1. DH increased his allowance from $35/week to $40/week, with a 10x lump sum of that at birthdays and Christmas.  It’s been $35/week for a long time and was $30/week before that and $25/week back in graduate school, so this isn’t that big an increase.  He is looking forward to buying a new super fancy monitor.  (Work will be upgrading his computer for him, but he wants a nice monitor for gaming!)
2. I impulse bought a $75 pair of jeans online without knowing if they will fit based on this post from anabegins.  There was a woman in the reviews who sounds like she’s the same size and shape I am who gave her size which is what tipped me into purchasing.  [Update:  They fit and are as advertised.]
3. After we get the water filter thing figured out, in theory we will move on to replacing the counters (I want quartz that looks like marble), the stovetop (DH really wants gas), and the sink (it’s cracked, showing the iron beneath it) in the kitchen.   [Update:  My sister’s car died recently and her car shopping got me looking at cars and there’s a lot of new stuff out there so we might replace DH’s car prior to remodeling the kitchen.  We will see.  Update:  We bought a base model Clarity for $35,500– it’ll be a while before we update the kitchen!  DH wanted a new car more than a gas stove.]

Other than that, all our plans are still puttering ahead back from when DH got back from layoff.  So that means we’ve been donating more.  We’ve funded backdoor Roth IRAs.  Our 529 saving was already bumped up to $750/kid/month (previously it was $500/kid/month).  The DCs will be going to various daycamps as expected (this will be the first year for DC1 who previously had daycare!)  I’m trying to keep 50K in the Capital One savings account (currently 40k), 30K + the month’s expenses in our Credit Union [currently down to one and a half month’s expenses with the car purchase], and ~20K give or take in Wells Fargo. (I don’t mind having less in Wells Fargo, mainly I put any reimbursements or side income that comes to us in checks in there and write most of our checks under $500 from it, so the amount varies.  We need at least 2.5K in there to keep the checking free.)  Additional lumps of money will go into a taxable Vanguard broad based stock, though I’m not sure how much to build up before making a transfer.  Back in graduate school I invested when it got to 6K over what I thought we needed (I think because that’s what it took to fully fund two IRAs!).  The last time I put money in taxable stocks it was 30K because we had excess leftover from living in Paradise.  Maybe I’ll do 10K now since that’s a nice round number.