Money Wise Mom

Clarification means providing more details or an interpretation to clear up confusion. It means to make something more clear. When something becomes more clear, we have clarity.

I owe you all a clarification. In my last post Milestones, I spoke to how my husband and I have evolved our approach to celebrating our anniversary from a more conventional and commercial minded approach to something more tailored to our preferences and values.

However, my husband’s hot take was that a key point should be clarified. The true tale is that we’ve taken a journey together recognizing and discarding scripts handed to us by outside influences. We saw our parents and peers go to restaurant and exchange gifts to celebrate an anniversary. In our first few years, we followed this script. Until we recognized that it wasn’t bringing us enjoyment. Together we found better ways to celebrate that fit our style and gave ourselves permissions to set the script aside.

This mindset shows up in a lot of choices we make and it influences our approach to saving and spending money. We strive to think critically about the systems and conventions around us. When we recognize an outside influence that is not serving us well, we happily discard it. For us, this is a key aspect of financial freedom.

Here are some other ways we’ve broken with convention

• In our twenties, many of our friends were buying camps. It seemed like maybe something we wanted at the time, but upon reflection we could barely keep up with one house, let alone adding a second property. Renting is a better choice, if and when we want the camp experience.
  
• Retailers would love to see us spend money on Mother’s and Father’s day. Upon reflection, it felt like consumerism. We left celebrating these days up to our kids. We’ve never bought each other gifts on these occasions. Instead, we encourage the kids to do something nice for each other or spend time with us.
  
• Fast food restaurants would love to have us eating out every day, and we witnessed colleagues who order take out multiple times a day! Over time we found we preferred to plan and make meals at home. Now we won’t default to drive through and almost never order delivery.
  
• Almost everyone we know pays for multiple streaming service. When we last moved, we cancelled our music and video streaming subscriptions and have since realized we don’t really miss them. We did keep our subscription to Xbox Game Pass, as we both really enjoy it and use it every day.
  
• More than half the households I see have multiple cars. When we first were married we couldn’t afford a car. When we could, we realized we were happy to max out our total cars at one for the both of us to share.
  
• I have family members who are Costco VIP customers. In my early years I would have leaned in this direction as well. However, my husband has made me realize that the money would not stay in Canada. We prefer to avoid big bulk stores as they promote buying a lot of stuff you don’t really need. We try to buy Canadian when possible and lately we’ve been looking to buy things locally at a store rather than getting stuff direct shipped. We collaborate on most purchases. We talk about where a thing will live in our house before we buy it. We tend to shop only for what we need. If we have something we want, we plan ahead by keeping a list of stuff we want to buy in the future; we are not recreational shoppers.
  
• I know lots of people with more clothes than storage space. Our wardrobes are pretty minimal by comparison. We buy clothes only when we need to replace something. We aren’t afraid to buy quality, as we want things to last, but we also shop thrift stores.
  

These are just some of the ways we’ve become a little less conventional. I hope that by sharing our approach to life, that you might find clarity as we have.