My wife and I are currently debating the purchase of an item and we agreed that we'd let other mustachians settle it for us.
Here's the background..
About 3 months ago I found MMM and really changed my lifestyle to be more frugal and less wasteful in general. I send my wife blog posts and forum posts that we can relate to and she seems to have taken a liking to it as well. I use to eat fast food for breakfast and lunch almost every day.. spending about $12 per day on crappy food! Now I've had fast food twice in the last 2 months! Also my wife has cut way back on her shopping, and we go out to dinner 1x per week now instead of the 3-4x previously. These changes have made a big impact on our savings account.
Both 29 yr old
She makes ~$100k before deductions
I make ~$50k before deductions + I always make several thousand during the year taking side jobs or random hussles
No student loans
No CC debt
Mortgage : $207,500 in a FHA loan, so we pay $215/month in PMI
No other debt
Savings: $22k
401k combined: $30k
Roth IRA combined: $10,600
Other Investments : $4k
So here's the issue.. I used to spend a lot of money on my hobbies, so we decided at the time that we'd have a budget for my hobbies.
Hobby Budget: $110 per month for my hobbies
- If I went over that amount she had an arguement, but if I stayed under that amount I could spend it freely on whatever I wanted.
- That budget accumulates, so if I dont spend any month this month, I could spend $220 next month.
- If I make money on the side (random side jobs) I would take 20% of that amount for the hobby budget, the rest in our savings
So I used the hobby budget money that I had saved for an electric bicycle. This put the hobby budget at $0.
At that point we found MMM and started saving a lot of money and I stopped spending money from the hobby budget. It's been several months and I've accumulated a few hundred dollars in there.
Since my wife and I found MMM we decided to set savings goals, which we've been successful with. More recently we set the goal to get rid of our mortage PMI. To do this we need to bring money to the table (probably ~$30k) which will save us about $400/month in the end. We're on track for this goal.
I want to make a purchase of an "item" (wont say what it is since it will probably bias opinions) that is a luxury item. This item is not necessary but I still want it. It costs $1200. I decided that I could sell my electric bike (which was bought with hobby budget money) and buy the other item for $1200. My wife does not like it because i'm still "spending $1200" while we have a goal. My arguement is that this money isn't coming out of our income, I'm just trading my electric bike for another item.
This is difficult because I've already sold the electric bike and deposited the money, which has shown up on Mint.com already. I think this adds to my wife thinking I'm spending our savings away by buying this item.
I think the bottom line is that I do want to still have hobbies and the hobby I like costs money. We save money on a lot of things and we make a good income, I'd like to spend $1200 on this hobby item.
Thoughts?
I'm aware of the previous "can i buy a pony" thread and how this type of thread is looked down upon because people usually end up buying the item anyway. Also we're not FI right now but there are a million other things we could still cut to save a small amount of money here and there, but they'd affect our lives negatively by not having them.
Also I'm linking my wife to this post, so we're actually going to consider the responses here.
Poll
