After many years I finally reached the point about which I question every purchase, could tell you how much per hour one of our 5w LED bulbs takes to run, calculate the exact fuel need/cost of what I need put in the tank for todays trip to see friends, and calculate the impact at retirement of the cost of yesterday’s papa johns pizza purchase.

It mentally utterly draining, and the daily usage or purchase angst/process is pissing off my wife no end.

So have gone from one extreme to the other, what next? (other than coke & hookers, obvs).

What about watches?

It’s not a bad thing, but it is very hypocritical to get all arsey about a 5w LED bulb whilst whafting around in a posh car or having other fancy pointless things which cost £ and carbon

My stepfather used to go mental about the hallway light being left on, whilst he had several flash watches…

Priorities and all that. I’m sure if you could evidence that the saving of £ and carbon aligned to things your wife cared about (affording to heat the home, something for the kids etc,,,) then it wouldn’t be a problem

Give yourself a time limit to make decisions based on how trivial they are. That way you won’t research LEDs for hours or agonise over pizza. Buy it and move on.

Papa John’s pizza?

You Philistine…..

I feel like I’m somewhere along this spectrum too. Almost every purchase seems to require a disproportionate level of research, review and evaluation to convince myself I’m not getting poor VFM or being diddled, to the point that sometimes I just abandon the whole thing.

My missus is the other way, prone to snap purchasing decisions and subsequent buyer’s remorse (which is also quite tiresome to be around sometimes), for example this morning she’s been printing returns labels for clothes bought online, very predictably the majority aren’t right…

I know where I get it from, it’s my Dad he didn’t grow up rich, and as he got older and accumulated some funds he simply wouldn’t go and piss them away. He never owned a car for less than a decade, seldom rushed to do stuff to the house and when he did it was almost always DIY. He is still convinced that every transaction is someone trying to rip him off…

The trouble is now I’m getting older I start to appreciate the impact beyond the financial, of all that delayed gratification. The lost Time and all the pointlessly stress over a fiver “saved” often isn’t worth it. I’m trying to be a bit more profligate for my own mental health, I’ve wasted a wee bit of money lately on stuff I didn’t strictly speaking need and felt pretty good about those purchases.

The trouble is we’ve not hoarded boomer levels of wealth yet, and there’s a recession and cost of living crisis hitting as we speak so I think my spending anxiety may well get a second wind now…

I try and buy everything second hand these days. It’s more effort but it does make the decision making part easier as I have less choice. Always makes weighing up the environmental concerns a bit simpler to resolve.

Go out for coffee just because and one of those cakes whilst you’re there because it looked nice.
Don’t worry about the price of each but maybe set a mental budget for just because money and maybe even try to spend it (assuming you can afford this). A fiver a week to buy coffee and lottery tickets you don’t need as a start perhaps? If you have slack in the household budget some of it should definitely be for this.
As for the bulbs I sort of feel your pain. But will the super cheap 5 pack from Toolstation still give nice light and not look plasticy even though they are super efficient? The ones you really want are always out of stock too. Aaaarrrggh
Edit: to be sort of anti materialist try to spend just because money on ephemera not stuff, so food, tickets to things, etc. Console any guilt of profligacy as keeping a sick economy functional if not functioning.

It doesn’t really have to be that complies though. The only question you really need to ask is ‘do I need this?’

Just buy less stuff. Easier said than done, mind.

I’m not exactly flippant regarding money, but there’s a lot to be said for living for today. Even just a little bit.
If it means I’m slightly less wealthy when I hit 65, that’s fine, because I won’t need it as much assuming I live that long.

Today, tomorrow, etc are both just as important as 2045 is

Just buy less stuff. Easier said than done, mind.

I do pretty well at this. Except for bicycles.

weeksy – what about care costs? 😉

I’ll come back to this later but jeeeeze, I thought this was just me, actually thought about going to counselling for it.

Setting a budget in your head for a day out seems to work better than just fretting over every purchase but I’m still trying to get to grips with it.

I was ok till me an an ex split about 10 years ago, at that point I was trying to rent while saving up enough to buy out her part of the deposit which meant on a meagre wage I had to save £10k in a year, which I did by never going out and living off Tesco yellow stickers for 12 months, but somewhere along that journey it really set in and even after all this time I’m trying to get to a point I think is more normal than just being worried about the cost of things all the time.

I’m off-setting it by buying nearly everything S/H were possible, tools I need for doing up the house, that G-Shock 2100 I was lusting after (half retail off Debop) is helping.

it is very hypocritical to get all arsey about a 5w LED bulb whilst whafting around in a posh car or having other fancy pointless things which cost £ and carbon

See, I disagree with this. It’s the “why aren’t you out catching real criminals” argument, or the notion that we shouldn’t be supporting a charity to (say) build a kids’ play area when people are homeless.

Just because something is smaller than something else does not make it worthless, that’s just woolly thinking. In the hallway light example, sure a posh watch will cost more than running an incandescent bulb for a few hours, but it conveniently ignores the fact that the latter is genuinely pointless. It’s waste just for waste’s sake, a nice watch presumably brings the owner a degree of pleasure.

We may “whaft around in a posh car” (if you could call a Seat ‘posh’) but with The Girl recently becoming a mum we need a car, last I looked buses didn’t have ISOfix mounts. Why not have something a bit nicer, is it a crime to have nice things? I bet if I were to come round to your house I’d find pointless extravagances like “carpets” and “wallpaper” and “cushions.” I bet you even have a television, you monster. What’s the phrase, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?” Well, having moved house fairly recently I know the price of paint, and bugger me is that shit expensive just to make the walls a different colour. Why?

Because really, is that not what the OP is about? It’s not about spending less, it’s about spending smarter. Is this [thing] I’m about to by worth the money, to me? Possibly. Is turning on the TV and every light in the house then going out for a walk beneficial to anyone? Unlikely.

How much do y’all spend on bikes?

I question every purchase, could tell you how much per hour one of our 5w LED bulbs takes to run, calculate the exact fuel need/cost of what I need put in the tank for todays trip to see friends, and calculate the impact at retirement of the cost of yesterday’s papa johns pizza purchase

That doesn’t sound like any sort of “anti materialism” to me. There’s nothing more materialistic than assessing every purchase and activity by its monetary cost rather than its value.

and calculate the impact at retirement of the cost of yesterday’s papa johns pizza purchase.

A colleague got this point, complicated by his wife’s health issues.

Totally stopped living in the present and enjoying anything, pretty much. Ended up having a massive breakdown.

Don’t forget to enjoy the moment. You can do both

weeksy – what about care costs?

Well you’ll either have too much or too little, but either way, it’ll work out mostly and then you’ll croak it

But until you know, you won’t know. You could save a pension of £2m and then die of a heart attack next week. Or the reverse of course, but you can only plan so much and buying an extra slice of cake is unlikely to be the demise of either plan.

I’m not saying to go nuts, but you can’t hold back on life just in case you may need it when you’re 85. You won’t need as much when you’re older and can’t do as many things for example

imagine how many led bulbs you can buy and the savings you can make by selling one posh watch.

it’s not about going without for things you need (like a car) it’s aboit not staffing £££k on a flash audio and then analysing and going on about the cost of something as cheap as a light bulb.

that’s not to say nice things aren’t nice. it’s about priorities and don’t whinge on about being anti materialist when you have a bunch of things that you really really don’t need.

autocorrect sigh

I do all of that by default, but it doesn’t stop me making a decision in reasonable time, quite the contrary, it allows me to make an informed choice and as such, I’m usually happy with my choice. Far from draining, I find it quite liberating. I don’t get envious of other peoples things/lifestyle as my mental tabulation rarely equals someone else’s, if there even was one to begin with.

Occasionally, I’ll be on the fence about something, but sleeping on it, usually clears this up.

Anti-materialism this isn’t, it’s a choice based on requirements. Feelings are part of that requirement.

No more Italian designer glasses to match the Alfa?

But seriously… Haff it all off.

Have spent the last eight months reducing what we possess down to the essentials.

Don’t buy anything for the sake of it. Buy out of necessity.

Get rid of all the fluff.

Things are only going to get worse in terms of availability and affordability. Do yourself and favour and switch now.

i’m not sure i understand what you’re getting at. are you pleased with what you’ve achieved or do you feel you have developed an issue that’s impacting your relationships?

there is so much information easily available these days that it seems daft to not research a purchase or to be able to calculate its long term impacts on other aspects of your life. i sometimes buy stuff after researching so deeply that i loose track of other options that in hindsight could have proved better fir an extra £50.

i’ve actually lost track of what i was going to say!

if you are happy, continue. if not try to change. but a penny saved is a penny earned

This doesn’t seem like anti-materialism. It just sounds stressful to me. Buy what you need, treat yourself occasionally, live life FFS. You only get one go at it. Do you really want to look back and realise you spent weeks of your life looking at reviews and budgeting in Excel.

I’m from a pretty deprived background, don’t earn a fortune and Mrs F doesn’t currently work. We get by and I don’t worry about money. There’s always someone worse off. Also your cheap bulbs are probably made by children in some Chinese education camp. Ya Monster! When anything is cheap it probably means somebody, somewhere has suffered as a result.

If you think being anti materialism is difficult you want to try being an engineer. I had this discussion some time ago and I reckoned being an engineer and having an innate innermost understand of mechanical items was a bane and an overall negative aspect.
Case in point is the wife arrives home and yanks the handbrake on without pushing the button in every **** time, or parks it in neutral (it’s an auto) and lets her foot off the brake letting the parking dog within the ‘box slam into position. Or changes between D and R before the fluid has come to a halt…..
Or not screwing down our old school rubber washer taps unnecessarily……

I’ve tried explaining but it falls on deaf ears. I will just kill her one day to appease my mechanical sympathy.

Thats the point of nature, isn’t it? You can’t buy the view…

I was going to reply to this then I read the @funkmasterp reply and that sums up my thoughts perfectly.

Oh I so understand that @RustyNissanPrairie, thankfully my wife also had good mechanical sympathy but dear god some people I know just kill cars, bikes, power tools etc from sheer sloppyness and not thinking things through.

Whilst we in the developed world are thinking more about this kind of stuff than before, we still consume materials at a rate the planet cannot sustain and are mostly hypocrites. A friend of mine regularly posts “Be Minimalist” inspirational bollox on Facebook yet jets off to the sun at least twice a year and, as a hobby, owns and drives two full size vintage buses with smoky diesel engines. I was going to pull him up but we’ve got 3 cars sitting in the driveway and the wife wants a Greek holiday in the autumn. How do we as a society discipline ourselves and our peers to downgrade our conspicuous consumption in a free market economy that thrives on consumerism? The OP has had his ‘lightbulb moment’ (sorry) but where’s the incentive to go green when flights are cheaper than train fares and EVs are hugely expensive and only as clean as the power station that charges them?

I’m struggling with some words currently, but can say that I’m not sure where the idea that leds were cheap came from. They are just LAP bulbs from Screwfix, bought as replacements for when the G9’s went.

Just visited my best made whose recovering from bowel cancer surgery, after we’d caught up about the day to day, he said to me “you always find something to be stressed about”. He’s known me for 39 years.

I’ll think on that tonight.

How do we as a society discipline ourselves and our peers to downgrade our conspicuous consumption in a free market economy that thrives on consumerism?

You talk about it and hold a mirror up to yourself and others and hope that you/they see the hypocrisy.

I might be missing the point slightly but try putting a nominal value on your time. Say £5 per hour.
So, if it’s going to take 2 hours to analyse next weekend’s activity, is that worth a tenner? An hour thinking about your lightbulbs, is that going to save a fiver?
And it helps with other decisions. 3 hours to clean your own windows? Pay the bloke the £12 he quoted.

I put a £ value on my time when assessing many things but it is much higher than £5.

Yes, me too. But this was for illustration purposes.

me too….I say every £20 spent is an hour longer I need to work. (not true but it helps as an approximation)

works the other way too. however as paye I can’t easily earn more. so an hour “saved” doesn’t equal £20 in the pocket unless I’m using that hour to do something I would pay someone to do….it that makes some weird sense

(this is still not anti materialism!)

I got that concept from reading up about FIRE and then realising I’d spend my life living off beans to retire early and probably die before I got chance to enjoy my life….

One of my closest friends counts every single penny. He’s the most miserable and anxious person I know. Spends so much time worrying about money (he’s got plenty) that he’s making himself ill and probably heading for an early grave.

@kryton – Apologies, don’t know where I picked up cheap for the LED’s but my point still stands. It’s worth more time looking at where things come from and how they get here as opposed to what they cost. Make the right decision where you can as opposed to the most frugal.

One of my closest friends counts every single penny. He’s the most miserable and anxious person I know.

Which one is the cause and which is the effect?

Make the right decision where you can as opposed to the most frugal.

This is important. I sometimes spend more than I need to try to support businesses that I want to support, because I fortunately can.

He’s got plenty of money and so has his wife. She’s not as frugal as him but still doesn’t go overboard. I genuinely worry about him.

Completely focused on retiring but he’s already got diabetes and a lot of stress related issues. It’s all from this needless worry. He’s only 43 and looks a lot older. Wish he would get help as there’s something underlying it. Similar upbringing to me but I don’t think he’s ever dealt with the past tbh.

I put a £ value on my time when assessing many things but it is much higher than £5.

It’s not just about the financial value of your time surely? I don’t really put a cost on my time, just not that money focused. What I do instead is think ‘Is there something else I’d rather be doing with my time’? If the answer is yes then I’ll either not do whatever it is or save until I can afford to pay somebody else to do it instead.

Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, consciousness is an evolutionary dead end, we are an anomaly doomed to fail, take a chill pill and enjoy the death throes.

he said to me “you always find something to be stressed about”. He’s known me for 39 years.

I’ve only read some of your posts on the internet and I’d concur.

Because really, is that not what the OP is about? It’s not about spending less, it’s about spending smarter. Is this [thing] I’m about to by worth the money, to me? Possibly. Is turning on the TV and every light in the house then going out for a walk beneficial to anyone? Unlikely.

How much do y’all spend on bikes?

Yep spending smarter,I think this is the thing.

I’ve seen a fair few scrimp and save for retirement but don’t make it, rather than enjoy the moment a little.

We’ve also just come out of a pandemic which should make you think of enjoying a bit of your money when you can and not assuming you’ll actually make that retirement and buy that artisan ti bike 🙂

That’ll end up pootling down the river bank as you can’t be arsed to do the epic rides you used to due to x ailment.