Spending Series Part 4: Spending Extravagantly On Things We Love
While frugality is an enduring pillar of Financial Independence, recently there have been some changing attitudes in the community towards spending money. Frivolous or unintentional spending is still mostly frowned upon, but there has been a big shift in spending on what makes us happy. In his book “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”, Ramit Sethi sums it up perfectly: “Spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.” Following that philosophy, here is a list of things that we love and therefore spend extravagantly on.
The Squire
Spending on what matters has been emphasized to a higher degree lately in the FI community, and it has in our household as well. My kids, parents, friends, and my wife and I enjoy spending time together, traveling, and trying new experiences. Why wait? We want to enjoy and make the most of our time on this planet. We make sure we set aside money for vacations, kid activities, and experiences.
- Family vacations. My wife and I loved taking trips before kids. Now that the kids are at ages where they can be out and about with us for longer periods of time and enjoy some similar experiences, we want to take advantage of that! We are scheduling multiple trips a year, both big and small. Car trips are becoming easier, and the kids are pretty comfortable in the plane. New experiences and locations are fun to both plan out and experience together. As our kids get older, we hope to travel to more places.
- Kids Activities. Our kids attend school and spend time with our family, but we highly encourage them to spend time with kids their own ages. We hope for them to learn how to work with others and develop friendships and memories. Participating in activities such as sports or band or clubs can help them practice working together through adversity, relying on others, and others relying on them. These are all important in their development and will hopefully help them later in life. We are more than happy to pay the activity fees, purchase or rent the gear, tools, and instruments, and spend the many hours taking them to practice and events, cheering them on no matter what.
- Entertainment. Music has played a large part of my wife’s and my life. We make sure to try to attend concerts from some of our favorite bands, which has been a real treat, and forges memories together. We will start inviting our kids to some of these too as they get a little older. Sporting events have been a fun family activity, whether attending a professional game, minor league, or college. We are happy to spend money on these experiences.
Scout
Although I spend “extravagantly” in select areas, this term is completely relative and must be taken in context. I don’t spend limitless money on these items, however I define “extravagant” as being more open to spending freely, yet still conscious of where money goes at the end of the day. Much of this spending is guided by a search for new, unique, and of course memorable, experiences for myself and my family.
- Kids. Like most parents, I want my kids to have a comfortable life where all their necessities are taken care of without a second thought. Beyond that I also want them to enjoy things that perhaps I never had growing up, things that I may think are frivolous, or things that they are really interested in. At the moment this means travel, letting them partake in whatever after-school activities they want, and allowing them to buy “fancy” clothing such as name-brand shoes (Nike & Converse) while I stick with cheap off-brands from Walmart, Amazon, or Big 5 Sporting Goods. To be clear, I don’t buy my kids every single thing they ask for since most of it is useless junk (at least in my opinion). However, I am open to buying quality items if they are associated with school/one of their hobbies or paying for an activity if it would provide a memorable experience. The most recent example of this is volleyball for my daughter. She’s never shown interest in team sports until now, but fell in love with volleyball during PE last year. Over the summer we enrolled her in a volleyball camp and she constantly practiced in our backyard and/or with her friends. Although she didn’t make the cut for her middle school volleyball team, she did make it onto a club team. While my wife & I have long sworn against our kids ever participating in club sports (because it always felt like a huge waste of time & money), as soon as our daughter made the club volleyball team we said “yes” without hesitation. With how hard she’s worked and more importantly the smile it puts on her face, we’re not going to deny that for any amount of money in the world.
- Travel. For most of my adult life I had a hankering to travel, but I was always too busy with work and felt like it would cost too much. My thought was that I could always travel once I was older, had more time, and/or when the kids were out of the house. For those who read about how I spent my summer, this all changed a few years ago when I read the book “Die With Zero” by Bill Perkins. Like many others in the FI community, I started to place much more emphasis on experiences and creating memories with my kids NOW while they are still young and living at home. Since then we have been to Europe, Hawaii, two Disneylands (California & Paris), and many more domestic locations across the United States. Our plan is to continue traveling, meaning big trips every summer & smaller trips throughout the year, hopefully ramping it up with even more international destinations. To be honest, it’s still VERY hard to think about spending so much money (especially when those travel bills come due). However, it’s completely worth it when one of my kids will randomly mention a distinct travel memory that we can all laugh about or look back fondly on.
- Seahawks Season Tickets. I know this totally sounds like a frivolous, non-FI, rich-person purchase (and honestly it probably is)… so I get it. But recalling Ramit’s quote about spending extravagantly on things you love, the Seahawks are something that my wife and I love. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve been a fan most of my life. My wife was a casual football fan when we started dating many moons ago, but over the past ~20 years she has become a huge fan herself, especially of the Seahawks. Watching games on TV and especially going to see games in person is really important to us for a couple reasons – not only do we get to cheer for a team we love & get to experience the moment with almost 70,000 other fans, but it’s also been a great bonding experience for us. For 3 hours each week during the football season we can forget about everything else in the world and concentrate on just the game at hand – for those who have busy lives like us, this is magical! And the best part is that our kids are now starting to get into football, so now every week is 3 hours of family bonding, all taking part in something we really enjoy.
- Concerts. Concerts combine my wife and I’s desire to participate in something we enjoy (we’ve been going to concerts together for over 25 years), while spending time with our kids creating memorable experiences, and participating in unique once-in-a-lifetime activities that simply cannot be replicated at home. Ever since we’ve been together (way back in the last century), my wife and I had frequently attended concerts together ranging from local bands (MXPX, Goodness, Super Deluxe, Alien Crime Syndicate) to major headliners (Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Weezer) to music festivals (Warped Tour, Bumbershoot). When kids came around, we thought that our concert-going days were over – this was true, but little did we know it would be just a temporary pause instead of a permanent one… Recently we began attending more concerts again and thought it would be fun to take the kids – it didn’t hurt that my son’s first concert was Taylor Swift and his second concert was seeing Imagine Dragons in Paris. We were pleasantly surprised that both kids started listening to more music on their own and we’ve been lucky that some of their favorite bands (Imagine Dragons, AJR, Olivia Rodrigo) have been touring recently. It’s always a joy to see how much fun they have at concerts and even better when they ask “when is the next one?”
As you can see, we currently have similar interests in spending money extravagantly when it comes to memorable experiences for our families. We’ll see how our spending stays the same and/or how it changes as we move into other stages of our lives.
Links/Resources
Reader Questions
- What are some areas in your life where you spend “extravagantly”?
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