I’m sitting at IKEA waiting another 30 minutes or so to pick up my kids, and seriously contemplating this $20 desk for my son. I mean, come on. It’s a desk, and it’s only $20. What’s not to love? So I call my husband because we also have an old computer desk in our garage that we were going to give to my son this summer. It had some sharp edges before we moved, so I was further able to rationalize the $20 IKEA wonder as safer.
My husband says on the phone that he’s fixed the desk, and it no longer has sharp edges. He also points out that if we use the old desk, that we are saving that $20 for something else.
My knee-jerk response is, “But it’s only $20!!!”
The slightly more rational side of my brain says, “Dude, $20 will buy 4+ pairs of shorts for kids for the summer, or 3 wonderful lunches at Liu’s, or get us 20 more dollars out of debt.” And yet left to myself, I would still buy the damn desk.
Financially, I really want to be debt free. But it is also really hard for me to give up the shiny, new “bargain”. Shopping, buying new things (necessary or not), is fun. Cutting coupons and giving up trips to the movie theater so I can pay the utility bills and the mortgage and still buy groceries and keep the kids in daycare is not.
I need to remind myself that that’s the point that we are at.
Arg.



