How to spot stupid spending
By Matt - Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
We’ve all spent money on things that really didn’t make sense before. You know those times where you just weren’t paying attention and overpaid on parking or didn’t pay and ended up with a parking ticket. Those moments where you simply stop and shake your head wondering what were you thinking. For me that’s stupid spending. I’ve always thought of this that way but while reading Larry Winget’s You’re Broke Because You Want to Be
Although personally I’m a lot better at it now than I used to be I still occasionally catch myself and shake my head. For example: I need to pay for street parking where I live and I can get weekly passes from the city for $15 or a 6 month pass for $60. Personally this one is a bit of a no brainer; I should have gotten the 6 month pass. There were some timing issues with getting one and the weekly one was available online so I got that for a few weeks. Now this is a stupid expense for me since all I needed to do was make a bit of effort and I would have saved myself a bunch of money (mostly on the handful of parking tickets I ended up getting). All of this is wasted money, the weekly passes and parking tickets included.
Very often I find that the stupid spending comes about from laziness. If you happen to forget to go to the bank to get cash and decide to use a competitors ATM. Not paying attention and paying a late fee on a bill. All of these are from us being lazy. I know I’ve done it and I’ll probably do it again. Most of the time that I end up with stupid expenses I know about it, which makes them worse and I’ve started tracking a stupid expenses category in my weekly budgets.
Why catch these stupid expenses?
I’m getting ruthless on this type of spending because I’ve decided I’m done with being in debt and broke. I know it will take a long time to get out of the problem it took me years to get into but I need to stop spending my money on truly stupid things. I don’t mean trimming down miscellaneous spending since it will always come up and a lot of these things are actually necessary. I want to remove the unnecessary and pointless wasting of money like my parking problem (which is solved) and my ATM fees in the past.
The reasoning behind this strong push to remove stupid spending is because if I’m able to catch $10 a week which is entirely possible I’ll end up saving $520 a year in wasted money. That’s a whole lot of money to be throwing away for no reason and that money will be put to much better use such as paying down debt.
Another reason that I need to catch these stupid expenses is that I can’t afford to have them at the moment. The reality is that for many people that $10 a week in stupid expenses is really nothing significant and they would rather spend the money for the convenience. At the moment I don’t have that luxury and I’m frustrated with myself for wasting money for so long.
To close off this post I wanted to start a list of stupid expenses that I’ve paid in the past as both an example and get ideas from you, my readers. What have you spent money on that has been a truly stupid way to spend your money?
The List of Stupid Expenses
- ATM Fees
- Parking Tickets
- Late Fees on bills
- Buying duplicates of books
- Buying extended warranty on my car
- Unnecessary spending at the grocery store
- …
This entry is filed under Commentary, Financial Situation, Saving Ideas.
2 Responses to “How to spot stupid spending”
1 Another Personal Finance Blog says:
August 12th, 2008
at 10:56 am
I see that you have $30 budget for “smokes” each week. That’s more than $1,500 a year. For your personal and financial benefit, I would suggest that you curb that spending. I equate that to a daily Starbucks drink or the three sodas a day from the vending machine that some people have. These are habits that over time are big money wasters. Easier said than done, I know.
2 Matt says:
August 19th, 2008
at 2:14 pm
I agree that I could save a great deal of money this way but having a glass of wine or some beer is how I tend to unwind after a day at the office. I know that there are other ways to do this but it’s also not a great deal of money. The smokes are simply stupid and I’m planning on quitting them soon (I’m thinking September 1st might be a good day).
I have been thinking about those two categories in my budgeting lately and what to do about them – they just cost so much money.
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