financial zen

In the midst of the whole work/school/parenting/marriage gig, my wife loves to check out the second hand shops. Our son, now 8 weeks old, has gone through so many clothes!

Luckily, there is a Second-Hand child store down the road - where we’ve bought nearly all of his clothes (and, owned by the same company, a store for expecting mothers!) Instead of shelling out the big bucks for baby Gap, we shelled out a few bucks for used Baby Gap, used name-brand maternity apparel, and, after spending (roughly) $180 (I’m talking maternity clothes and baby clothes over the pregnancy period to the past couple weeks) we’ve turned around and sold them back - not at a profit mind you, but enough to make it worthwhile to continue buying used clothing from these stores!

Of course, they only buy “in-style” or “in-season” clothing, but if you can hang on to a few items for a couple months and sell them back then - if they don’t end up in the Goodwill pile.

That of course, is where all our other clothes end up - the clothes we (or I) have stockpiled over the years, and I finally parted with a large chunk, and together we’ve accumulated five bags and three boxes of clothes that were dropped to Goodwill - cleaning out our closets has been a very nice experience, getting rid of those items we’ve not worn in many years… this way, someone else can find our old goods, and use them, wear them, and enjoy them in the ways we haven’t been able to in a long time.

(I know, I’ve been gone awhile, but that’s life for you!)

Blueprint For Financial Prosperity has an excellent write up about his prior addictions - from soda to bottled water, and how it’s important to not get hooked on “the higher end items.”

This is one of those areas that my wife and I are often at odds about - she prefers bottled water, expensive meats, and Jif peanut butter, along with other items that are more expensive (but are they necessarily worth it?) I, for one, enjoy eating the leaner cuts of beef, and made the mistake of buying cheap peanut butter once. I can’t recall the brand, or where it was from, but it was the most disgusting peanut butter I’ve ever tasted (and I’ve tasted military peanut butter, which isn’t half bad!) Water, on the other hand, I prefer to drink cheap. Until my last apartment…

Where we once lived, the tap water tasted like chlorinated pool water. We made spaghetti with it, and it tasted like chlorinated noodles. Brita water filters did nothing, so we took up to buying bottled water (.59 cents a gallon from Kroger’s). We drank a ton of water at the time (we were on Weight Watchers), so this caused a huge dent in our budget, up until we moved.

Thankfully, our current water off the tap (ran through Brita) tastes excellent - although my wife swears by country water, which makes me think of Homer Simpson - and in honor of bottled water “If it’s brown, drink it down, if it’s black, send it back!” - and in honor of Smashing Pumpkin’s new Album, Zeitgeist, here’s one of my favorite clips.