Some people might think that’s a lot of work, but w/ how easy electronic transfers are these days, you can do it in less than 2 minutes 1 day over the weekend.

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In keeping with the argument I made that calculating costs to us can be brought into conversation with the question of costs to others and that each of these prongs as well as both, in tandem, can help us reclaim ethical agency in a society striken with a veritable disease of consumption, here is an old article about something truly extraordinary some kids from the Bronx did in the late 90s: http://www.saigon.com/~nike/news/ny092797.htm

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I’m shocked by how much money I’m throwing away. So for me, I think as a going forward stategy, I’m going to do the following:

The money I would save by not buying lunch is $1250.00 per year. If I divide that by 12, one thing I could do is committ to putting away $104.17 at the end of each month, as a way of depositing my lunch savings.

It may sound a little corny to do this, but it would be incredibly easy, especially with online banking. My bank allows me to transfer funds from checking to savings (and vice versa) with very little effort online.

That’s going to be my plan, after I get some groceries for next week and buy a coffee maker.

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I tried to post something like this to Paula’s article but it didn’t work for some reason.

Just to point out the over-determined and complex nature of the stakes with respect to something as mundane as “how much money
I spend a month on coffee”.

One thing your blog mentions is your interest in saving money so that you and your partner can save up for a home. Paula is interested in investing her savings, as are at least Nina and Rich.

What keeps me reading Queercents as a student of philosophy, though, is not necessarily the nitty gritty advice about how to save but, rather, because Queercents and other sites (as well as my own blogging) allows me to canvas some public opinion about how people do and should relate to money and markets. I’m a firm believer that philosophy is not the exclusive provenance of “great thinkers” and academics but is in some way already woven into the fabric of everyday life. Philosophy for me is about practice and not necessarily a library of classic books with stuffy titles.

From my perspective, what you are up to in these blogs shares much with some of the fundamental ethical questions that come up time and again in the work of “great teachers/thinkers” from the Western tradition (I think one can draw some comparisons to material in Buddhist ethics and other non-Western thought and practice but this is not what I know so I’ll stick with the West). Some fundamental questions–of which there are certainly different versions–are: How much influence do cultural habits have over the shaping of our desires and how much is our agency circumscribed by the culture in which we grow up? How much control do we have to retrain or school our desires?

Let’s say one has gotten into the habit of going to Starbucks everyday on the way to work. It might become almost second-nature and automatic to do so. One can speak of being ritualized, I think. Starbucks is very good at getting its brand story to seep into the psyche through the senses and the “values” it claims to be committed to. But, if we actually do what you suggest and stand back and calculate how much that daily latte is costing us over the span of a year, we might jolt and that naturalized relationship with Starbucks compromised.

Thinking about costs to us over time is *one-way* we can get some critical distance from our ingrained consumptive rituals and habits. Marketers would love it if we walked around the mall or surfed the net, making purchases as if this activity were akin to pulling an apple from a tree or breathing the free air. In fact, read marketing books and you’ll see that Starbucks is singled out for being so good at making its brand “connect” with consumers on a narrative level (think: the way we might relate to a TV character we grow attached to over time and see some of ourselves in that character’s life).

Consumption rituals get so naturalized that people do literally max out credit they shouldn’t have without giving much self-reflexive thought to the implications for personal finances (and I know this is a big issue for young women and young LGBT folk who move to the big cities to live the “Sex in the City” or “Queer as Folk” lifestyle…there was a great article about this a few years back…about the costs of the stories we tell ourselves and perform for others). If we get into the practice of asking tough questions that inevitably break the hold of the fairae tale spells of things like Starbucks, we reclaim some ethical freedom. That’s my ultimate point.

Another way we can strive for some critical distance from our consumption habits is to think about the costs to others and to the environment. For example, if one reads this article– http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/starbucks — I think one is more apt to think twice about walking into the nearest Starbucks out of sheer habit. Not that everything then boils down to self-conscious reason but instrumental information about the costs of things to ourselves and to others and the interrelation of our personal habits and global justice can make a big difference in schooling or retraining our desires.

Something like calculating costs or, to shake things up, looking at the darker side of some kinds of cost cutting on a global level (the deleterious effects a general interest in having more stuff, more cheaply can have on global wages and the environment) is actually, in the end, about self formation.

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So yes, for me cutting back on morning cappuccinos, expensive lunches, drinks after work, random crap – goes into my savings and then investments.

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I believe that is the big catch. Good news is I just put $ in savings monthly & “live” on the rest so in a covert way I may already be doing this — but I just never get to see it and get the “wow” factor that the calculations you lay out give me on paper.

What about you or others? What has been your experience?

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