Spending

Trouble and I don't spend very much money on stuff - we both tend to be anti-stuff, though our house is overflowing with baby related items. I am very excited that I will get to start purging baby items as baby finishes using them. Woo!

We do spend a lot of money on food. Between my hippie organic ways, eating out, and just eating more because I need to eat five meals a day, food is our primary expense every month. While I know we could do a lot better with meal planning and saving money on food, I don't mind too much - of all the things to spend money on, food seems fairly reasonable to me - though it would be nice to be saving more. Our other big expenses over the past few months have all been "random" - travel, insurance, new vehicle. In the past two months, the only stuff I can remember buying is a pair of happy-pregnancy-feet sandals, some mulch, and some fancy yarn for knitting in doctors' waiting rooms.

As I finish up my PhD, I am trying to spend down my grant money. I have been far too frugal, so I have book/software/supply budgets that need to be spent now. I'm getting books for medical school and a bunch of classic statistics books that I will use for the rest of my career. In some ways, it is kind of fun to build my professional bookshelf. In other ways, I feel a bit gross for getting so much more stuff into my life. At least I can store all of the books at my office for another year . . . after that, I may need some sort of rolling, under the bed bookcase. Yuck.