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I Am Not a Good Shopper

September 9th, 2006 at 09:51 pm

I went to Target with my $10 worth of gift cards (Harris Poll Online Surveys) and shopped for an hour and a half and spent $9.37. I just don’t have much of a shopping streak. I had originally been worried that I would spend too much splurging for my vacation, but I guess I was wrong.

I am not always sure how to count gift card purchases. I don’t want to count them as income, because obviously I couldn’t put it towards rent or utilities. However it seems as if that way I could “spend” $10 on clothes or something and not have it show against my clothes budget. Then next year, my clothing total would be falsely low by $10. Well, since it’s $10 I’m not gonna worry about it. If it was $25 or $100, I might need to look at a different method (not just for The Challenge, but for me on an ongoing basis. I’m into tracking my expenses).

I did end up getting Nair (will be on the beach), a journal (a must for travel memories), a tiny spray bottle (for Fabreeze) and a pack of disposable razors (vacation and getting pills of my sweaters). This was after looking at many items, and trying on eight bras. I have room left in my toiletries and clothes budgets, so I didn’t need to be so restrained, but nothing seemed right. I almost got two pairs of shoes, but the more I looked at them, the more they seemed cheap. I just don’t want to buy disposable clothing.

My reluctance to spend $10 on an item probably was enhanced by being at garage sales, where things are such great deals. My haul today totaled $4:

Two gifts - $1

Two wet/dry women’s battery powered razors, with batteries: $1

Necklace, I think it’s a silver plated chain, $1.25

shorts, needed for vacation, seventy-five cents

Brush/mirror travel combo-free

Plastic hanger-free


With the shavers, I’m planning on being decadent and putting one in the bathroom and one in my travel bag. On the chain, it is heavier than non-silver, but isn’t marked 925. I did a Google check and didn’t find any good tip to tell if it’s real silver. That’s okay; I needed a longer chain for pendants and I couldn’t return it anyway. It’s not like $1.25 for a chain is outlandish!

I did get my hair cut, though I didn’t get it washed and wet in freshly showered instead. I brought in pictures of my hair for the hair stylist; dorky but it helped her. It was $18; no Challenge would ever get me to be a bad tipper, and I tipped $6, although $4 of $5 would probably have been just fine.

And the last bit of money news: a whopping ninety seven cents extra income from recycling. (I had a lot of non-money stuff to take in, so it was a full trip, just not the good stuff.)

Posted in Minimum Wage Challenge, $20 Challenge, Good Frugal Life | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “I Am Not a Good Shopper”

  1. baselle Says:
    September 10th, 2006 at 05:48 am 1157867298
    1157867298

    I know what you mean about the gift cards - I've been using them to make a sale out of quality stuff or, in the case of food and coffee cards, to use them near the end of a paycheck to keep me from hitting the ATM one last time.

  2. LuckyRobin Says:
    September 10th, 2006 at 09:02 pm 1157922169
    1157922169

    Maybe you should just add a gift card tracking line to your budget spreadsheet. Not in the budget perhaps, but a few lines beneath your totals. Then you can track those from year to year as well as month to month and maybe what categories you used them in, so you can compare those as well. Gift cards are going to keep coming, either through your earning them or people giving them to you. If it is separate from the budget, but there, you will not forget that that is why you had extra items bought without spending extra cash on anything.

  3. threebeansalad Says:
    September 11th, 2006 at 10:45 pm 1158014728
    1158014728

    Regarding tipping: I always tip a hairdresser 20%, which in your case would have been ~$4 (rounding up). Am I a bad tipper? I've never really knwon how much to tip at the salon.

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