Spending to Get it Out of Your System

[Smashter]

I came across an old ERE blog post - http://earlyretirementextreme.com/borso ... atrix.html

and this line caught my eye -

"Perhaps a good first step towards frugality is to spend a few years consuming as much as you can so as to get it out of your system so you can focus on something more interesting—I know it worked for me."

I think Jacob is being tongue in cheek, but I was curious if anyone has actually done this. I've heard health experts say something similar. "Go eat whatever crap food you want for a year, and then once you notice how bad you feel you'll want to eat healthy food."

But if this were really the case, wouldn't the majority of people have become disillusioned with consumerism/junk food by now? Are the marketing messages are too powerful to overcome, no matter how bad we feel? I'm sure the answer is complex, just curious what people think.

[jacob]

I think most people just copy whatever lifestyles they see around them. And really, if only one lifestyle, consumerism, is visible, it takes significant creativity to come up with something else and significant independence to actually pursue it.

I wasn't actually being that tongue in cheek. Until I was 24, I was a typical consumer/upgrader, always looking for what next to buy or reading reviews to figure out what the best new thing was. I had already noticed that such "highs" were only temporary (excitement < 3 months), so when an alternative presented itself, I was ready to go for it.

[JamesR]

I mean if you're a typical consumer you're gonna rent a nice/big place, and then feel compelled to fill up the place with furniture and gadgets. A year later you hopefully might realize you haven't touched your breadmaker in a year, your TV is too damned big, and your cable bill is ridiculous, and that your STUFF is owning you, that it all has a cost and is dragging you down and sapping away your power/money.

[Tyler9000]

Sorta on-topic -- It definitely worked that way with my career. I had major career aspirations for many years, until I finally got a peek at what the high levels really look like and realized it's not what I really wanted. Getting it out of my system was helpful in preparing me to do something different without regret. Then again, getting career out of your system has the exact opposite effect financially of getting spending out of your system. So it's not exactly apples-to-apples.

I did also get a bit of the spending out of my system in terms of always having the newest gadgets. Since I worked in new product design, consumerism burnout closely coincided with career burnout. You can only go to CES so many times before you realize it's just a treadmill of stuff.

[vezkor]

my sister went to CES for the first time this year. She works for a silicon valley startup and her work sent her (all expenses paid) so she went. She's putting ERE into practice on the expensive west coast by saving 60%+ of her ridiculous 110k annual income. Even though rent is typically $1400-2000 per month or more in her area of The Valley, she's eschewing the norms and doing a lot of cooking for herself + free activities/entertainment (despite massive social pressure to spend spend spend). Also, she turns 30 next month

I'm proud of her because we both used to be typical consumers. I like to think, in a major way, we both "Spent to get it out of our systems" when we were in our early 20's.

Dunno how much true merit there is to the practice, though. I think it really depends on your personality type and what kind of social environment you find yourself in.

[Dragline]

I think most people just copy whatever lifestyles they see around them. And really, if only one lifestyle, consumerism, is visible, it takes significant creativity to come up with something else and significant independence to actually pursue it.

I wasn't actually being that tongue in cheek. Until I was 24, I was a typical consumer/upgrader, always looking for what next to buy or reading reviews to figure out what the best new thing was. I had already noticed that such "highs" were only temporary (excitement < 3 months), so when an alternative presented itself, I was ready to go for it.

Yes, point 1 is actually part of our natural human condition -- to mimic others around us, and more specifically to imitate the desires of others around us, which then become reflected in the dominant culture. It makes some sense from an evolutionary and cultural standpoint, as an emergent property from the basic condition. See http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... -part-deux

My own "conversion" -- to the extent you can call it that -- occurred over a period of years, but the period between paying off the student loans and realizing I preferred saving and relatively simple experiences to acquiring a lot more shit was around 1999-2004. But I always thought that consumerism was basically immoral as a form of idol worship (I'm so pre-20th Century/progress theory of history.)

[Fish]

I've done this before. I remember ALMOST buying a pressure washer (of course, new and "great deal") but stopping myself because the house was already overflowing with stuff. I could relate to Jacob's comment in the ERE book about playing Tetris with my stuff just to make it all fit.

Moving beyond the physical, there was an episode where I bought thousands of $$ of "virtual items" for a computer game in the course of a year. At the time I was effectively living in that game when not at work. Strangely, spending all that money destroyed my interest in the game because it messed with the effort-reward relationship. (I think one reason games are so popular is the linear E-R whereas the trend with many RL activities, including salaried work, is nonlinear.) When I had my PF awakening several years later I was kicking myself for not having put that $$ toward the mortgage. And now that I'm a little further down the road, it was a very good, and relatively cheap lesson on the psychological effects of spending at low/negative marginal utility. Among my peer group I now see this manifested as luxury cars, designer handbags, exotic vacations, endless "upgrades" for home and even the house itself. My excesses were not so bad in comparison.

[jacob]

(I think one reason games are so popular is the linear E-R whereas the trend with many RL activities, including salaried work, is nonlinear.)

Interesting. It seems even logarithmic. Level advancement seems to happen faster (in wall clock time) early on.
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Elite_Rating#Ratings

What's that about youth being wasted on the young and money on the old.

[Fish]

@jacob You're right! In my experience I liked effort-reward being linear in a local sense, that if the ratio is X that it won't all of a sudden change to 0.5X or 2X. Maybe predictability is what RPG players like. Once I successfully extrapolated achievement out by a month by measuring rate of advancement (and correcting for the logarithmic progression you noted). Of course there are other game genres where this doesn't hold. Slot machines anyone?

Edited to add: Both youth and money were clearly wasted on the Fish.

[IlliniDave]

I went through my few years of exuberant acquiring too. In some ways I now feel like a recovered addict. The subject line sounds almost like a different type of addict saying, "Binge on heroin for a year to get it out of your system."

Some people truly become addicts and never unwind a spending addiction. Better to never start than to count on some variant of rock bottom to save you. Just my $0.02.

[C40]

Like many of us, before I started focusing on my finances, I spent most of my income. So I was spending a ton on some things (bicycles, some vacations), but was naturally frugal with others (didn't eat in restaurants much, booze, dates, did most things myself rather than hiring someone)... So I did sort of get the spending out of my system.

Also, a year or two ago I got some extra side money from work. I traveled a lot. I'd fly on planes. Sometimes the airline asked for volunteers to go on a later flight, offering them money. I did that two times in quick succession, and then sold the vouchers they gave me, and had $750 for doing basically nothing. I decided I would blow all the money and it not even account for it in my financial tracking. First I bought some $115 headphones that I already was thinking about buying. Then.... I was trying to decide... Looking at different options... and so on.... And I got tired of it. After I'd stopped spending for a few years, spending money became a pain in the ass. It wasn't the thought of letting money slip away. It was just a pain in the ass to decide what general item I wanted to buy, and then research which exact item to order, and where to buy it from, and then monitor the tracking, etc. I found that I'd rather just "do". Just do my hobbies, or just relax, or whatever. Spending money became a burden. After a while I decided I'd rather just relax and stop thinking about buying stuff, so I abandoned that "free spending experiment" I'm really happy that I did it because I didn't know how much I would feel that spending money was a pain in the ass.

Near the end of last year, I spent a few thousand dollars on some new camera equipment. It was the same thing. All this research and analysis on what to buy... what each thing costs... pros and cons... deciding if I should spend the money... justifying it... etc. etc.. It was a pain in the ass and I was relieved after I bought it, partly just because then I could stop thinking about it.

[Sclass]

Whether this works or not depends on what spending does for you.

For me, spending was almost akin to addiction. So binging on spending to get it out of my system is kind of like David Foster Wallace binging on high grade pot one last time so he'll never do it again in his book Infinite Jest. He just keeps doing it and hates himself for it. I'm not saying this is you but binging may not be the appropriate way to get it out of your system.

On the other hand it can work. Depends what spending is to you.

For me I transformed my relationship with spending by living in a world of less rather than more. I spent a few months at age 22 living among some really poor people in Russia. They had almost nothing and they seemed to survive. And they were happy. I was deeply moved by the experience. I came home and simplified. My gf at the time left me over it. "What happened to your nice clothes SClass?" I no longer needed them, or her. It's lived with me ever since.

Just a thought. Maybe you should go cold turkey rather than binge to set out on your new path.

[oldbeyond]

I had two phases, one gadget geek phase in my teens when I was constantly drooling over computers and other electronics, reading forums, watching product launches, debating the merits of CPU X vs Y with religious fervor. I spent quite a bit of my allowances and cash gifts on it, but I saved most of the wages from my summer jobs. In the end I simply realized that the latest upgrade didn't do much for me, that I had simply tied myself to a marketing merry-go-round. I also lost my interest in gaming, which was the cause of much of my upgrade anxiety with regards to computers.

The second phase was more status concious, where I realized that I didn't want to buy shinier toys but status and respect. So I drooled over fancy clothes, cars, apartments, furniture and trips. Fortunately I didn't have the means for any of it(I was a student at the time), so my purchases never went beyond a few $100 shirts and overpriced sunglasses, much of which is still in use today. This phase met its end in two realizations: that a Rolex wouldn't make up for social awkwardness and that mining the earth dry to fuel an endless status arms race perhaps wasn't all that reasonable. I lived simply and frugally for a couple of years without any real framework, and then I found the FIRE-sphere.

I'm naturally cautious and frugal, so even in my spendier days I showed quite a bit of restraint. The major change was in aspirations and mental preoccupations. For me the change didn't come at rock bottom but upon reflection. And age, probably. Our brains change.