Obviously I am no longer making any money as an architect. My 2 projects I had left that I was counting on to get me thru till summer were indefinitely postponed last week. The money I make is not a lot.....sporadically like $2-5K every other month, but that is my money and I spend it everywhere. It's for:
1. Vacations (weekend trips to Phoenix, Vegas, San Diego, LA)
2. Bimonthly trips to Old Navy for clothes for the kids
3. Endless amounts of craft supplies from Michaels
4. Toys and knick-knacks from Target.... I used to spend $800/month on crap from Target... new hand towels, new sets of sheets, cool frames, DVD's, the latest trade paperbacks, cheap shoes for the baby to go with every outfit, novelty t-shirts for the boys, anything and everything that looked cool.
5. Books from Barnes and Noble.... I used to spend about $80/week there.
6. Amazon and yes this deserves is own line item seperate from Barnes and Noble. I am the queen of Amazon. I don't like to get just 1 book a week (like I am now) I like to order 20-30 books at a time from Amazon. I have over a 100 books in my shopping cart and saved for later I am so far behind on my book shopping.
You might think..... wow that's a lot of money spent on crap, but that is what keeps consumer spending up and the economy moving. Those are all the things that keep me sane. It's all entertainment... not the shopping so much, but all the things that we buy give us something to do. We need books to read, we need to visit other cities, we need clothes on our backs. Now that I've lost that income I am most cetainly bored. I guess in one way we just need to be a little bit more creative in how we spend our time. We are repainting our craft projects instead of buying new ones to paint, we are watching old DVD's that we haven't seen in a while, we are buying shoes that go with every outfit, I am reading all the classic books that I paid so dearly for from Easton Press instead of buying new ones, we are exploring closer to home and finding places we didn't even know were right in our own backyard. It's not all bad, but it is definitely different.
I guess we should be glad that those are the only things we are losing due to the economy. We have no problem paying our mortgage or any of our other bills. There are families that are not able to buy groceries or pay their rent and all I'm moaning about is books and crap from Target, but still we are feeling the pinch.
1 comment:
As Amazon is to you so B&N is to me. We're paying bills only because my ILs took over Oz's autism treatments ($2800/month) for which we previously wiped out our savings. I miss the extras and then I feel guilty I ever had the extras. Whose crummy idea was this recession, anyway???
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