This has been eating away at me for the last little bit and I wanted to share and get your thoughts.
I’ve been frugal pretty much most of my life out of necessity, however over the last 10 years my career has taken off, couple that with some good real estate investments, a good capital market, etc I am in a pretty good financial position.
About 12 months ago my wife and I decided that it was time to do some spending that we had dreamed of doing for a while, mostly to our home. We spent about 80k in cash on home renovations, which transformed the house completely and were done predominantly by me, had to hire out crews for some of the larger jobs, but even then I worked alongside them to ensure everything was done right.
I also went ahead and spent $50k on two cars for both of us. Both were used, one 3 year old Toyota that will be in our family forever (we tend to keep cars for long stretches) and one fancy sports car for me that’s 5 years old (redeeming quality here is this car has really bottomed out in depreciation and is holding its value fairly well, at this point I can probably sell it for more than I paid for it). I also do all maintenance and upkeep of our vehicles.
All of this was paid for by cash in the 12 months and that’s after making 30k+ annual retirement contributions to my retirement fund, (similar for my wife). All is well right? Well, yes, but…since the cars and house remodel neighbours have been commenting how fancy this looks, how nice that is, then they will ask about the cars, etc. Mind you, we lived in the least attractive home in a great neighbourhood and drove 10+ year old cars for the 6 years living here. In fact when we first moved here and I was doing a basement gut people walking their dogs would ask me “what are the owners doing to the house?” as they assumed I was just a worker (younger guy scrubbed out, beat up 15 year old Honda outside, etc)
So here we are, in 12 months the optics of our lives changed due to significant spending that we had agonized over for years, we are doing just fine, but I feel like I am an MMM imposter. I didn’t need to do any of the house stuff nor did we need new cars. We are extremely happy with our decisions and would do it all over again, but I feel I am carrying this tremendous amount of guilt for doing it. My wife is more frugal than I am and she tells me to stop dwelling on it, but for whatever reason I can't let it go.
Anyone feel the same way?