Comments on: Choose Your Financial Vice

By: Alyssa Fischer

Alyssa Fischer — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 16:05:41 +0000

Yes, agree!!

By: Accidentally Retired

Accidentally Retired — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:46:21 +0000

Love me my travel vice, though it is much prepared for and budgeted for. I agree, you can't deprive yourself of everything, you gotta find the real joys in your life and 10x those while trimming back the rest of the fat.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 13:58:42 +0000

I love the idea of looking at spending from this perspective. I think that your 4th point about it not having to be permanent is an important one, too. I feel like our money situation changes sometimes and so do our priorities.

By: Kim at The Frugal Engineers

Kim at The Frugal Engineers — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 17:42:38 +0000

This was much easier for me to handle when I was single. Giving myself a "fun money" allowance made sense. Now as a married couple with a kid, the lines blur often between "fun money" and "family entertainment". I try not to stress about the individual categories too much, as long as our overall monthly spending is within our FIRE budget.

By: Caroline at Costa Rica FIRE

Caroline at Costa Rica FIRE — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 15:12:43 +0000

Great point that choices often aren't either/or, but instead, all of the above! Having to deprive yourself constantly is exhausting. I like your point about choosing one thing at a time to see how you feel. There is a great book called Little Bets about the value of being more experimental with your goals -- not financial specific, but more overall behavior change. Your other point about deciding on an overall spending target is something that we use in our household. We don't keep a budget but we do track our spending each month and look to stay within a target range.

By: Maria @ Handful of Thoughts

Maria @ Handful of Thoughts — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 14:22:10 +0000

In our budget we call this “fun money”. We’ve gone through and figured out an amount that we are comfortable with. We often take that out in cash and then don’t track it more than that. Each of us can spend our fun money on whatever we want, no judgement, no explanation. It is such a relief to know we have that money without having to worry about it.

My husband often spends his every month and I save mine up for a few months for bigger things.