SCRIMPING
What puzzles me is the relationship between my daily and monthly spending, my attempts to live within my monthly income and still travel for a month to some distant place every third month and my so called assets, my overall retirement savings and the value of my house which gyrate up and down wildly, certainly out of my control.
In some countries, like Ukraine right now, the outside forces are so huge with the chance of your house itself being blown up any day, that the idea of living within a budget seem ludicrous. And of course for many people living from hand to mouth in the United States all that matters is getting along each day with what they have which is no assets at all.
But if you are somewhere in the middle with a house paid for or rent to pay, a car to maintain, mouths to feed, clothing to purchase with an income from work or from investments, then the outer forces make a great deal of difference. This year the outer forces are high inflation which cuts the value of my income, the stock market which is my back up security and the value of my house which can be threatened by flood or fire or housing valuations going up or down.
Those who are retired on College View Drive have had the value of our houses increased astronomically lately and even more because the College which owned our land, valued at $1, went out of the housing business and suddenly the land was our own, an enormous gift. At the same time we deal with our retirement nest eggs dropping by 20%. And in the middle of all of this our daily expenses are pushed up almost 10% by inflation.
I have no idea what to make of any of this. Gasoline shoots almost to $5 because of Ukraine, then it drops to $3 because of who knows what.
I save a buck by buying gas at Ingles and the same day I lose $500 because of the stock market, I buy a jacket cheap on Amazon and discover that the dollar has gone up and down a lot when I travel. I have no idea if I am coming or going, whether saving a buck is good practice or whether it is made irrelevant by the larger forces around me. As Alfred E. Newman so wisely said, ”What, me worry?”
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 