As an experiment, Gina and I are forgoing any and all luxuries we have to spend money on for the month of July. She's been very worried lately that she's becoming too materialistic, or too greedy a consumer (in large part because she's fallen in love with yarn produced by a specific indie dyer and seller, who releases each collection of vibrant, hand-dyed yarn for only a few hours, one weekend a year, with a different collection available each week). She feels awful about sitting by her computer waiting for these sales to start up each weekend and feels guilty for spending her hard-earned money so lightly, especially when, with her current schedule, she has very little time for knitting.
So we decided to try going a month without spending like that - if she wants to begin a new project she has to use yarn from her stash, while if I want to watch a movie, it needs to be one I already own - if I want to paint miniatures, they have to be ones I already have avaialble, and if I want to run a game I have to already own the books. We're also cutting way back on going out to eat for the same reason.
We bought a Scrabble set on Friday night and have been enjoying a daily game of that, which seems to help with her anxiety as well, and we also got a folding table and a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle that she intends to assemble and then frame as a gift to my parents.
We also had a massive "pre-No-Buy July" splurge; she bought a couple hundred dollars' worth of ultra high-end hand-dyed yarn, and I bought about $90' worth of Reaper Bones figures (it dawned on me that, having the prime them by hand with gesso, Bones will be a great project for me during the winter months when I can't go outside and spray-prime, plus with my renewed interest in Dungeons & Dragons - and nice new folding table to play on when it doesn't have puzzle on it - I'd like to get out the miniatures again for that purpose) and a big stack of OSR books.
Does it maybe defeat the purpose of No-Buy July if we have a big buying spree right before? You tell me.
