Are You Better at Earning or Saving?

Only the lucky few are good at both

Behold, the new $14.95 nightgown! I shall live in it for years. That’s Mr. Joe in the background. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

To do well in this world you need to figure out a way to earn a lot of money and to manage it well, but very few people seem accomplished at both.

Some people earn a lot and spend a lot

I know people, and so do you, who are successful at earning lots of money but still carry loads of debt. They earn a lot, and they spend a lot. 

I know a former big earner who let several million dollars slip through his fingers and now, in his 80s, is working full-time for less than $20 per hour.  

Others earn earn a little and spend a lot

Oh, I bet you know just as many people like this as I do! They don’t make a lot of money, but they have great taste. They have to have a big house. They have to take a vacation every year. They have to drive nice cars. 

You know what they do for a living and you can’t figure out where the money is coming from. Maybe they inherited a chunk, you think. In a lot of cases, they have second mortgages and the kind of credit-card balances that would give me insomnia no pill in the world could fix. Sometimes these folks have a come-to-Jesus meeting with their banker and fix things. Sometimes they crash and burn.

Some earn a lot and spend little

Those folks are an endangered species. They do exist – I just don’t know any. From time to time, you hear about somebody with a fortune who is re-using their coffee filters and refusing to turn the heat up above 50 degrees. 

A larger category is made up of people with money who truly believe they are thriftier than they are. They are quick to brag that they used frequent flier miles to help pay for their trip to Hawaii. Also, they used a coupon last week at the grocery store. Most people can point to one or two things they economize on and feel very proud of.

Some earn little and spend little

You may know people who are very thrifty but who don’t get ahead because they don’t have much money to work with. This is my category. 

I just never managed to land a good-paying job. I never earned much as a journalist and make even less as an author and freelance writer. My husband is an immigrant, so he had to start over when he came here to marry me. He works hard for his money, which has been covering our basic expenses but not much more. We just got through several years of virtually never purchasing anything but groceries.

My writing is beginning to earn a bit. Unlike a couple of years ago, sometimes I do spend money on things that are not absolutely necessary. Each time, I feel a little weird and conflicted about it. Even if one of my books became a best-seller and was made into a movie, and I suddenly had millions of bucks in the bank, I don’t think that would change.

I think about the cost of the item. I think about what else I could do with that money and whether the item is the best use for it. I think about where the thing will be stored and about whether it will ever wear out. Can it be recycled someday or will it ultimately take up space in a landfill? How much energy did it take to make it and get it to me? I think about whether the money I pay is going to enrich someone running a sweatshop or will otherwise exploit people (although I don’t know of any way to avoid such things totally). Spending isn’t just a question of money, but one of morality and ecology as well. 

Here’s the judgy part!

I roll my eyes – and get kind of angry, honestly – when I read “success” stories about people who were several hundred thousand bucks in debt but made themselves a nice little budget and then, thanks to their brilliant savings plan, paid off all that debt in a year or two. 

I read such stories pretty compulsively. They fascinate and horrify me. I think, “How in the hell did someone who has several thousand bucks left after paying their basic living expenses ever get $300K into debt in the first place?” 

And let me say I’m not talking about things like medical debt that people have little control over, or student debt that they had to take on in order to work in their profession. I’m talking about people who can’t really say what they spent all that money on, because they spent it on one new outfit or weekend getaway at a time.

I privately think, “You were blessed with so much more money than others, and yet you just squandered it?”

Let’s pause here to talk about my new nightgown

Don’t get too excited. It’s not going to be that kind of story, although it is a cute black tank-style nightgown and if I were younger and hotter, I could pose in it and use the image to grab a lot more attention for this story than it will probably get.  

I had been wearing my previous summer nightgown for around a decade. I don’t wear nightgowns to sleep in – I like complete freedom at night. (Also, if I were younger and hotter, I’d talk more about sleeping in the nude, but I don’t think that’s in my best interests here. Forget I said that.) 

Anyway, what I do is, when I have to get up in the middle of the night to let a dog out, I throw on a nightgown because one wall of my kitchen is essentially all glass, and I don’t want to frighten the neighbors. And when I get up in the morning, I put on the nightgown before I let out the dogs and make coffee, and I continue wearing it while I’m waking up and reading the news until I’m ready to shower and dress. At night, I like to change out of my clothes and wear the nightgown all evening as I read, write, talk to my husband, whatever. 

What I’m saying is, I use my nightgowns as at-home loungewear. When I am in for the night and not expecting company, there’s an overwhelmingly good chance I’m wearing a nightgown. Sorry if this is too much information for you.

So a couple of weeks ago, I told my husband I was thinking about replacing my nightgown. “You mean that rag?” he said. And then he added, “Are we really in a position to spend $15?” Ha, ha. He is worse than I am.

I thought about it for a while, and then I did it. I bought a new nightgown.

But then, a few days later, I began to think about what I’d do on laundry day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a second decent summer nightgown?

I considered it. It would, indeed, be a great luxury to always have a clean nightgown to lounge about in, even if I got behind on the laundry. I thought about it for a week or so. Was this a reasonable purchase or not? Finally, I did it: I bought a second summer nightgown. And it felt sort of like how I think it might feel to buy a sports car.

Now I’m wondering what each of you is thinking. Some percentage of you are wondering why in the hell I haven’t had several decent summer nightgowns all along. Some of you are thinking if the threadbare old nightgown had not completely disintegrated, I should have kept it, and I’m a wasteful bitch for not doing so. And some of you are just now realizing that there are people for whom the question of whether to splurge on a $14.95 nightgown is a real thing. 

How you answer will tell you a lot about yourself.

So which are you?

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.