A month ago I wrote that I was going to spend $600 in February. The numbers are in. How'd I do?
$1,052 dollars left my accounts. Ah! I failed! Miserably!
Not so fast.
See, I don't actually care how much money I spent last month. I care how much my life cost last month. Those aren't necessarily the same number.
I'm in the middle of building out a shipping container. I spent several hundred dollars on materials for that build last month (lumber, tung oil, fasteners, some seam tape). I consider materials for a shelter that will provide value to my life over a long period of time a 'capital expenditure', or capx. At some point I'm going to finish the build and stop dumping money in to it, but it's going to continue adding value to my life.
It is more realistic to depreciate the cost of the build over the amount of time I expect to receive value from it, and count that towards my monthly "cost of living". In the case of the container, my budget is $5k and I expect it to be in my life for at least five years, so I account $83 per month.
In the other direction, I only spent $25 dollars this month on gas. But last September I spent $800 on insurance, and a similar amount on new tires. So it's not entirely accurate to say that "transportation" only cost me $25 this month. The monthly cost of ownership of my vehicles actually comes out to about $112 before fuel. (!)*
So taking all that in to account, my depreciated lifestyle cost in February was $634.
So... actually, yeah I still failed. But only by $34! Close enough, I'm calling that a solid win. I haven't spent this little (with or without the accounting trickery) since college.
But why on earth would you…?
The real value of the challenge is that I effectively did a "No-Buy" month, a challenge that's gone around the internet for years. The idea is that for a period of time, you only spend money on absolute essentials: food, housing, car payments, soap, toothpaste, et cetera.
The point of the exercise isn't to endure austerities and prove your mental toughness under suffering, it's to challenge your creativity and get you to the "next level" as quickly as possible. Our culture bombards us with the message that we can buy solutions to all of our problems. Bored? Buy a toy or watch a movie. Feeling low-status? Buy a shinier car. Feeling dumpy? Go clothes shopping.
By executing a no-buy month, it stops those thought patterns in their tracks. It makes you sit with them, feel the pain, feel the Pavlovian response of wanting to spend money to make the ache go away... and then feeling it pass over and through you, and realize that buying stuff doesn't make the ache go away for longer than a few minutes anyways, and maybe there's some other more effective way of dealing with your problems.
I almost never experience boredom because I have so many fun projects on my list - in fact, one of those line items is "stop doing stuff for long enough to feel bored", which I've been procrastinating on for years. I don't think I've been bored since the nineties.
I actually did deal with some low-status feelings this month. I sat with it, felt it, tried to understand exactly what was causing those feelings, and reminded myself that I've chosen an odd, complex, difficult to understand path that few people are going to "get" much less assign any value to. If I'm committed to this path, then I'm signing up for some measure of judgement and social aversion. In fact, noticing hard to swallow feelings like status shame and FOMO is a sign that I'm on the right path. So I was able to flip it around and be encouraged by these feelings.
I felt dumpy a couple times. I did some yoga, some hill sprints and bodyweight workouts, went for a walk, trimmed my beard, and then took a shower in the sun. I felt amazing after all that.
“Forest bathing” indeed.
I spent hardly any money this month (by the standards of the culture I live in), but I didn't notice any lack at all - in fact my lived experience was richer than my norm. I felt my brain changing, as I refused to give in to old patterns of seeking to buy a solution to my problems. By setting some firm boundaries for myself, my thought patterns quickly adjusted and stopped nagging me to buy stuff.