Budget newbies! I see you’ve got almost a month’s worth of expenses in your little notebook there. Actual entry for me today—four deviled eggs and a packet of peanut butter sandwich crackers bought from a local butcher ($2.00). Why? ’Cause I was thrown out of my usual routine and found myself, between errands, starving in the middle of an unfamiliar and strangely non-commercial part of town.
Still, it wasn’t too bad a deal. I love deviled eggs, but they are time-consuming and labor-intensive to make—especially if you are fancy and pipe the yolk mixture with a pastry bag—and I only paid three times what the peanut butter cracker sandwiches would’ve cost me had I bought them in bulk. Not only that, but my other lunch option at the butcher was a $5.99 turkey sandwich.
Which brings me to today’s lesson: flexibility.
If routine is a budgeter’s best friend, then flexibility is her (and your) secret weapon. If I had to have a turkey sandwich for lunch, I’m out $5.99 plus tax. If I just wanted around 500 calories of mostly protein … hello, deviled eggs and peanut butter sandwich crackers! If I just wanted a blast of fat and sugar, I could’ve, for sure, spent even less.
Take this principle, apply it broadly, and you could have a nice little bit of leverage for your budget. Last year, my extended family celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday because so many of us were flying on Thanksgiving, usually the least-busy (read here: cheapest) air travel day of the year. To top it off, the posh NYC pumpkin cheesecake I brought to dinner? 30% off. What can I say? I am a classy gal.
I bought most of the clothes I wear because they … fit. Which is why you’ll find me in snow pants made for teenage boys. Possibly pre-teen.
Ground beef, King’s Hawaiian rolls, and cauliflower were reduced for quick sale this week. Guess whose kids are eating cheeseburger sliders and roasted cauliflower for dinner? Winning!
Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about quality or that there aren’t very good reasons for being inflexible sometimes. After all, only one person in the world is allowed to take scissors to my hair, we live within shouting distance of our kids’ school, and I still get a real Sunday newspaper delivered every week. The whole goal of LBYM is having the freedom to spend money on things we value.
But for everything else? Do I care that my mattress and box spring match? The brand of my mascara? The fruit in my cobbler?
Even the federal government has gotten in on the notion of trying to save a little money through flexibility. You may have heard about a little government program called Social Security that provides or will provide us a retirement benefit. You may also know that a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) is applied to these benefits every year so that recipients’ purchasing power is protected from inflation. The COLA is tied to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is based on how prices for a basket of goods and services change over time. If the CPI in a given period goes up 2%, so goes the COLA.
Not to get too technical here, but a criticism of the CPI is that it overstates inflation because it doesn’t take into account changes in purchasing behavior due to rising prices. If apple prices were to spike, would I pay up? Or just eat more pears? An alternative Chained CPI was created in 2000 that takes such substitutions into account. If COLA was based on Chained CPI, Social Security benefits would rise more slowly, saving the government money.
Now, I don’t know if the COLA calculation is actually going to change, but better to stay ahead of the curve, hmm?