Queercents

What’s your personal savings rate? As a spender trying to turn myself into a saver, my own savings rate has fluctuated pretty wildly. I’m proud to report that it is in the double digits now, but it was not an easy task getting there.

Nor is it an easy task for our country. The personal savings rate has been in the news quite a bit lately- primarily it is good news, as the personal savings rate increased over last year to 3.6%. While this does sound good, a little history lesson on personal savings rates might be in order.

My grandparents’ generation was incentivized to save by growing up during the Great Depression; the personal savings rate hovered between 8 and 10% from the late 1940s until the mid 1980s. My parents generation, the baby boomers, were implored by their parents to continue this savings trend, but as the dot-com bubble grew, and disposable income increased, spending replaced saving. Exactly why this trend reversed is still up for debate, but many theories point to the “wealth effect,” in which consumption is stimulated by increasingly higher incomes. (Think about it: If you won the lotto tomorrow, would you spend more money first, or save more money?) Read the rest of this entry »

Just because the biggest shopping season of the year is behind us doesn’t mean us shoppers don’t have to deal with temptation. In fact, the abundance of “super sales” this Jan. and Feb. have actually been more troublesome for me than the entire holiday season.

As part of our “Turning Spenders Into Savers” series, we’re deconstructing sales pitches- and discussing how to combat them. Previously in this series we discussed “why we buy”, encouraged you to “give yourself credit”, and offered different tactics for dealing with the internal urge to purchase.

However, lately I’ve found that my inner spender is coming out less and less in response to my own urges, and more and more at others’ request. And nothing is more demanding of me to indulge that inner spender than a good sales pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of this holiday season, we spenders have to face quite a bit of temptation out there. While I do believe it is possible to turn a spender into a saver, I also know it will not always be easy. Case in point: my recent Etsy adventure. (If you don’t already know what Etsy is, please don’t blame me for introducing you!) While attempting to buy cheap, nice holiday presents for my aunt and cousin, I was quickly sidetracked by ALL! THE! CUTE! STUFF! (and SO! CHEAP!) Next thing I know, it’s three hours later and my shopping cart list has ballooned to over 15 items. Only 2 of which are for people other than me!

So what stopped me from hitting the buy button, and draining my paypal account? A simple, and quick, exercise that has now become part of my buying routine. I like to call it “Do you need it?” Basically, I review my purchases while asking myself “Do I need this right now? Can I continue my day-to-day routine happily without it?” And obviously, the answer is usually no. Except for the rare time I run out of lotion, or cooking oil, for the most part, I don’t really “need” to buy much in order to maintain the current status quo.

But when I’m in the act of shopping, I can very easily convince myself that I “need” that sparkly new necklace, or that rare honey from Italy. Which is why now I’m allowing myself to load up my shopping cart and feel the freedom of isolating the “things I like” from the rest. This eases a physic battle I constantly feel when confronted with things I like but I should not buy. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you seen the new Visa Check Card commercial?

It features a lunch room cafeteria in full swing, with dozens of people ordering, cooking, walking and paying – all perfectly synchronized. While busy, cheery music plays in the background, the whole cafeteria is engaging in this well-coordinated routine; seen from above it looks like a Busby Berkeley number. All is well until the dreaded cash guy arrives. While everyone else swipes their Visa Check Card for payment, the cash guy has to pull out his wallet, count out bills, and accept change. The music slows, and the perfect routine implodes, with people bumping into one another, drinks spilling, etc. The tag line implies that using cash will just slow you down. In many ways, that is true and I actually think it is inadvertently a great endorsement for using cash. Little does Visa know!

Think about it: with a credit/debit card, you are much more blinded to the total cost of your purchase than with cash. Surely debit/credit cards are faster than cash, but in our current economic situation maybe what we need to adopt is a slower, more conscientious approach to spending? I know my personal transition from using credit/debit cards to cash helped guide me toward being a better saver. Sometimes, slower IS better. Here are 4 reasons why using cash is better for your wallet. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes all I need to dissuade myself from making a particularly impulsive purchase is a little bit of time. Conversely, I’ve definitely also experienced the shopper’s “walk of shame”- getting up in the morning to a shopping bag of things I neither need, nor really want 24 hours later, While there is nothing wrong with returning things, sometimes it would be nice to spare yourself the extra time and effort and just avoid buying in the first place, especially with these impulsive purchases.

These delaying tactics are helpful if you are that particular kind of shopper; one who gets caught up in the emotional rush of the purchase, or who has a hard time saying no to a salesperson. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, there are many reasons why we buy, and one of mine is wanting a salesperson to be happy. By employing these delaying strategies, I found myself more able to say no to pushy sales people, or to consider my real needs when making a purchase. There will always be a plethora of reasons why we buy, but hopefully with these few tactics we’ll buy (ha ha!) ourselves some time to analyze them further and eventually make financial decisions we feel better about.

One note: These suggestions are all totally obvious, but I challenge you (and myself) to really re-consider them. They are much more difficult to implement than to understand. Read the rest of this entry »

I wasn’t surprised to see this recent article from the New York Times shoot its way up the most e-mailed articles list. After all, the NYT Most Emailed List a good way to gauge the temperature of a particular subsection of society, and it seems that right now that particular sub-section, along with everyone else, is concerned about money! And when people are concerned about money, that concern often spills over to parts of their lives that they usually feel are pretty distinct from money, like goals and relationships. Now all us Queercents readers know that money isn’t so very far away from anything in our lives, but the NYT puts it nicely:

So much of what we want — or don’t want — out of life boils down to dollars and cents, whether it’s how hard we choose to work, how much we consume or how much we save. For some people, it’s working 80-hour weeks to finance a third home and country club membership; for others, it means cutting back on office hours to spend more time with the family.

“A lot of the debates people have about money are code for how we want to live our lives,” said Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who researches the economics of marriage and divorce. “A lot of the choices we make in how we want to live our lives involve how we spend our money.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are many theories that aim to label people’s relationship to money (almost as many as those that label relationships to other people- as we all know!), and I’m sure at some point they are helpful to someone. One of the most familiar is the old “saver/spender” dichotomy. According to this theory, most people fall into one of two categories; either they are a saver, stockpiling money for use at an undetermined time, or a spender, unable to tear themselves away from any purchase.

While this is obviously a little simplistic, I do think we can recognize parts of ourselves in these descriptions, and sometimes even, identifying with one of these can prove very useful in recognizing and changing certain behaviors. I’m starting a new series of posts, entitled “Turning Spenders into Savers” which aims to help us in the areas where we identify as spenders. Most especially in these tight economic times, changing our shopping and spending habits can have a lasting impact on our lives. And if you don’t feel like you fall into a spending frenzy over anything at all, then forward this on to people who might, like recent college grads living away from home for the first time, or high school students developing spending habits.

As for me, I feel like I fall squarely within the “spender” category. While there are things I’m more apt to splurge on than others (hello bacon of the month club!), I definitely like to spend money much more than I like to save it. Call me stereotypical, but, as a femme, I love to shop. Read the rest of this entry »