What others do that I find nutty? Its when I read blogs on the “Mommy” sites that talk about how much financial trouble they are in and are going to declare bankruptcy, and then ask “How long till they will give me a credit card again or a car loan”… can you belive that!! just plain nutty!

When I was with my ex, we lived well beyond our means, ’cause he liked to spend and I couldn’t deny him. Our credit cards, all in my name, were almost always full. I would ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’. The stress was enormous. That was my NUTTY. Having been a saver before him, I was horribly uncomfortable.

Now, 15 years later, my spouse of 13 years and I have savings and retirement investments, plus the retirement property, and we use our cards wisely. Either they’re paid off every month, or they are interest-free periods that are ALWAYS paid off. After having no car loan for 2 years, I recently had to buy a new one. That car loan is now gnawing at me, which I find a little nutty. We look at folks around us, wallowing in debt, and acknowledge that we could not do that, it would just be too uncomfortable.

My nuttiness was having fabricland card to buy fabric but I have anuf fabric to make projects so I haven’t renew it since it expire it Dec. 2008..
I bought yarn for another project but it time to move it on since I have anuf crochet projects on the go…

Having pay later stuff (bed, freezer, desk, couch)even though we always pay it off item on time but last time came to close not have anuf cash to pay it off in six months.. Now it time to save for the item before buying item..

Nuts to have a not proper budget to never get ahead in life.. But now we do and feel more ahead than behind with debt and debt is still going down and we both on same page…

Having a flyer route to get exercise instead of joining a gym so we have to exercise twice a week while earning cash for extra things we seem never to afford it ( a finally short vacation).. (Get in shape and some fresh air since we work to much in doors) My family thinks I’m nuts but it’s rewarding to get pd for exercise…

First, I don’t haggle — I feel that haggling is rude beyond belief. I am aware that if I do not haggle I’ll be paying the surcharge that will benefit people who are willing to be rude. I have no idea how to solve that because attempting to solve it feels like trying to develop a taste for kicking puppies.

The second is, an offer for zero-interest buy-now-pay-later on an item I could easily afford would, from a perspective of pure number-crunching, best be handled if I put the money in a savings account and do auto-payments from it, instead of putting it cash on the table. I might get over it on the joy of fiddling with numbers, but again I’m not sure I really want to.

Seriously nutty: I starve myself when I’m on vacation. I can go through a three-week vacation on a hotel breakfast and a candy bar per day. It’s a relic from a time when I could afford travel or food, but not both. I’m trying to tell myself how much of a waste it is, traveling foreign countries and never even tasting their food, but it’s an uphill battle.

On the thin line of nutty vs. normal, I spent an insane amount of money (2000 Euros) on clothes, shoes and handbags in the last 12 months. I know that there are people for whom this is normal, but on my scale it is far out in nutty-land.

Financially, we were doing a few things that I now think were poor choices, and that came to light when we did the budget. We spent WAY too much on groceries, and somewhat too much on “educational stuff / experiences” (contrary to my earlier way of thinking, your young children CAN have too many educational toys/puzzles/books). And we were spending money on some conveniences that added up to a LOT–parking downtown ($25-30/day!) was crazy, for example, when we were saving nothing towards RESPs or some big travel (Europe, Australia, among others) we want to do with our kids. We now have money being set aside for the “good things in life” like travel, and it is a joy to watch the ING account balances grow, and know they are there to be spent and enjoyed without any worry, as all our other ducks are in a row now.

The one thing we were doing that was WAY NUTS though was being a single-income family sans emergency fund or disability insurance. Since TDDUP and this blog we’ve maxed out our TFSAs and are poised to do it again in January (ta da! EF done!) and finally got confirmation about disability insurance yesterday (a more than 2-month process, involving family doctors who left practice and would not release medical records, among other things).

So while given our non-mainstream life choices I’d hesitate to call us “normal”, I don’t think we’re nuts either. As Gail says, you can have anything you want in life with hard work and a plan!

But it does get a little nutty too… This weekend I saw an ad in the paper for a flooring place that had cork flooring for 65% off. That was my floor covering of choice to replace our terribly crappy bedroom carpet (that we have been living with for 10 years). At the cheapest I have seen it, in a colour and style I actually like, a made-in-portugal product, with a decent warrantee… yet I still felt absolutely SICK handing over the money (even though it came out of the planned spending savings account, not credit).