#PENNY PINCHING PACKRAT FULL#

You have the money now to buy that new monitor you’ve been pining after for months, and you’ve double-checked, triple-checked, and quadruple-checked your bank accounts and all of your bills for the next few months before spending the money (because you always do that before spending money), and it’s nice and pretty and so much better than this old thing you probably should have replaced a year ago.īut you do not, repeat, do not dispose of the old monitor. So, yes, when Michael and I were loading the last of the Christmas decorations out of the storage space at our old apartment this weekend and I discovered yet another old monitor that we had wrapped up and stashed when we replaced it years ago, I felt a bit of embarrassment, because that meant we had a total of six old monitors to get rid of, instead of the two that we had thought just a week ago.īut another part of me knew why it was there. Or that there is a $10 fee required for this class activity that is part of your grade. You don’t want to know the terror and humiliation that comes over a kid from a struggling family if you are informed that this next assignment requires your parent to buy something unexpected. I talk about the bullying in school, but that wasn’t the only horror that school sometimes visited upon me. I’m talking the plain white box with black block printing that sold for 20-cents a box (and about four or five times a year would go on sale for 10 boxes for a dollar, so you’d buy five bucks worth when it did because that meant you had a cushion in case of an unexpected expense later).Īnd a good portion of my childhood was spent with our family living like that. Not the “expensive” kind with a picture of orange sauce-slathered pasta on the box. At least half of my meals at the time were things like cheap boxed macaroni and cheese. In that situation, any unexpected expense-no matter how small-meant skipping at least one meal during that pay period. My parents had been divorced for years at that point and one of my dad’s least awful behaviors was that he absolutely refused to even fill out financial aid forms for any of his five children, let alone send any support that wasn’t ordered by a court.

#PENNY PINCHING PACKRAT FULL#

My mom was working full time (when for health reasons she shouldn’t have been working at all), lived in another state, and was trying to support my younger sister. I was attending college part time and working three jobs ( three jobs). This wasn’t because I was bad at money management or because I was living above my means (at least not the way that people who like to throw that phrase around use it) or because I was lazy, it was because I made very little money, period. There were several years of my life when every single dime of every paycheck was already allocated before I got it. Had the time and money to only ever hold what you needed that moment, because you could always buy more later. That was when I realized minimalist living was /innately/ tied to having spare money, because the idea was, of course you just went out and bought the single replacement thing whenever the first thing broke. It suggested that you needed one or two working pens, so if you had extra you should get rid of them. This really locked into my brain when I was reading one of the declutter your space things and it suggested getting rid of duplicate highlighters and pens. Tumblr user Ignescent explained it really well:

And the thing about economic anxiety that is most misunderstood is that it is not irrational. The biggest anxiety in question, and the one we mention least often, is economic anxiety. Packrat behavior is sometimes clinically defined in terms of controlling anxiety.

Every single penny accounted for…A recent Tumblr post reminded me of one of the reasons that people who aren’t packrats don’t understand packrat behavior.

Penny pinching packrat