Tickets to a show. We have our first child-free weekend coming up (as long as my in-laws don’t call us after two hours and say we have to come back, which feels like a real possibility lately) and we really, really wanted to see some music. But something kind of low-key. And something not far from home. Fortunately a real dirtbag establishment we had a lot of fun at in our before life is having a show that weekend before – get this – closing forever. Perfect and devastating. Have we ever heard of the bands before? No. Do we know what kind of music it will be? No. Is there even the slightest chance we’ll be able to stay awake past the second band? Absolutely not. I can’t wait. $31.
Remember my goal to not shop online this year? I should’ve included in my exceptions list that I had $200 in store credit at a favorite ethical and eco-conscious (supposedly, anyway) brand that I’ve been saving in case a specific dress ever came back in stock. Well it came back in stock, so I bought it. After store credit: $122.
Short story submissions at nine literary magazines. $29.
Preschool waitlist fee at one of the preschools we’re most interested in for next year, which we assume is to deter non-serious applicants from registering. $15.
The Astros Orbit stuffie my husband found secondhand on Mercari and insisted I buy for our kid. An online purchase, but more my husband’s than mine. I’m just the one with the Mercari account. $19.
Three grocery store trips for midweek fruit and vegetables and the buttermilk my husband needed for cornbread. It was a lot this week because the pickings were slim when we did our regular grocery shopping last weekend. $64.
A peppermint tea at the cafe where I spent two hours submitting short stories while my kid was in preschool nearby. $4.50.
A loaf of olive bread from the bakery, to go with the lentil soup we’ll be eating through the weekend. $10.50.
A shirt, a set of four beautiful green bowls and a pirate ship from Goodwill. $31.
One more online purchase, and another that I consider a justifiable exception, but that really starts to be a slippery slope. I bought a coat last November that turned out to be defective, so I attempted to exchange it but they had sold out in my color/size. So I returned it for a refund. The coat came back in stock so I ordered it. It was always my intention to re-purchase it. $123.
So, obviously a lot more this week than the past couple. Some room for improvement, perhaps. The dress and the coat definitely set fire to my intended budget for the month. I don’t have any more big exceptions lined up, so I’ll just call this week a blip in my otherwise perfectly-on-track low-buy year that we’re only three weeks into. I’m fine with all the other purchases. The green bowls will be perfect with the “nice” dishes we use when we have friends over for dinner, the shirt is a lightweight, 100% cotton floral-print button-down that I’ll wear a ton in the spring/summer, and the pirate ship is really fucking cool and a steal at $2.50.
What I wanted to buy but didn’t:
Nothing. Is that a victory, or did I just buy everything I wanted this week?
The dress/the shirt
Frugal wins:
We had a flight canceled in November and the airline we had to book a replacement flight with charged us for our bags. I finally got our original airline to process our reimbursement, and I also got them to refund me (in airline credit) for the money we had to spend on airport food when the restaurant vouchers they provided didn’t work.
A couple years ago I bought a decent rain jacket that just never worked for my body. The arms were too tight but the body was weirdly big. By the time I accepted that I just couldn’t wear it, the return window had passed. I finally sold it this past week on Poshmark.
Additional groceries: I stopped at Safeway on Wednesday to buy fruit and veggies (and the frozen hashbrowns my husband requested) to get through the rest of the week. I’ve recently resolved to make half of my plate vegetables at each meal (even breakfast!), so this week I found myself needing to buy a lot more. We also purposefully held off on buying kale for the white bean and kale soup we made tonight so it wouldn’t wilt before we used it, so that was part of the trip too. $45
One of my half-veggie plates
A cinnamon roll at the cafe by my kid’s preschool. Is this the opposite of spending on extra veggies? I dropped my kid off at preschool and went to the nearby cafe to work on some writing. I had intended to buy a mint tea (one of the cheaper menu items, zero calories, and zero caffeine since I’d already had my morning coffee) but the cinnamon roll spoke to me. I’m not mad about it. $8.50
A ten-pound bag of brown basmati rice from the chef supply store. We buy staples like rice, beans, oats and lentils from the chef supply store in bulk. I used up all the rice this week so I went out to buy more. I think this is what people envision Costco being for, but in my experience Costco mostly has large quantities of convenience foods. For example, ours doesn’t have uncooked lentils, but they have pouches of pre-cooked lentils. That’s just not how we cook. So for us, the chef store is where we buy our bulk food. $13
Bread to go with the soup we’ll be eating all weekend, from the local bakery. $11.50
Pretty good! I go to the cafe by the preschool almost every week because I have nowhere else to go on the one day each week I get to drop my kid off and leave. We walk or bike to preschool, so I have to go somewhere nearby, and it’s the only place to go. I consider it a necessary preschool expense.
What I Wanted to Buy but Didn’t:
I don’t really have a laptop/commuter backpack. I just have a few travel backpacks, and they’re bigger than this. I’ve been running into instances where it would be nice to have something smaller and less “I just left a hostel,” such as taking my kid to preschool and then spending a couple hours at a cafe writing. I might buy it eventually, but not right now.
Frugal Wins:
A while back I tried a recipe for pho broth that tasted decent on its own but, with noodles and veggies added, was far too bland. We didn’t like it as soup, but I had a ton left over so I froze the rest. I’ve been meaning to fish it out of the deep freeze and just throw it out. But this past week I decided to use some of it as cooking liquid for rice, and it made pretty tasty rice.
Medication. I’ve been sick, and went to the pharmacy for Sudafed and NyQuil. I’ve never actually bothered to get Sudafed before, settling instead for DayQuil, which has been found to contain an ineffective decongestant and never does seem to do much. Sudafed has helped. $34.
Dog medication. I picked up a new bottle of ear drops for my dog, who is prone to ear infections. $27.
Additional groceries. I ran to Safeway yesterday to buy cauliflower, collard greens, kale, an onion and bananas. We always go grocery shopping over the weekend with a meal plan in mind, but often run out of produce midway through the week. Usually I need to buy more fruit than that, but I’m trying to use up some frozen fruit this week. $23.
That’s it! I consider all of those items to be necessities, so I’m pleased. Regarding my midweek produce runs, I’ve learned something VERY exciting (to me lol) – the Asian supermarket just down the street that closed about seven years ago is finally going to reopen, as a different Asian supermarket. Given that my husband and I share a car and he needs it for work most of the year (he bikes in good weather), it’s going to be really nice to have a walkable grocery store again. Asian supermarkets usually have a great produce section, so I really can’t wait for that. I’m eager to see how their fruit and vegetable prices compare to Safeway and PCC (which is also walkable, but just barely, and their produce is expensive so I usually don’t shop there unless they’re running a coupon).
What I wanted to Buy but Didn’t:
I already have a pair of convertible gloves (fingerless gloves with a mitten flap, and the thumb also folds back) from this brand and they’re the only pair of gloves I wear. They’re great for dog-walking, because I can free my fingers and thumbs to work with a bag, and they’re also great for whenever my kid does something dumb like dump grapes all over himself, which is often. They’re not very warm, and they’re also starting to show some separation where one of the flaps meets the glove, so I was thinking about buying this insulated pair. I like that the company uses recycled materials. I will probably buy these eventually, or maybe add them to a Christmas list. But for now, if needed I’ll try to mend the ones I have.
This bag comes in 6L and 11L, and this is the 11L. I have the 6L and use it as my everyday purse. It fits my waterbottle in the external pocket and my keys, battery pack, kindle, packable grocery bag, wired earpods, chapstick, floss and mirror compact internally. However, it wouldn’t fit any packable outerwear if I needed to take off a layer (when I’m doing something active I like to wear layers of packable outerwear, so this isn’t entirely imagined), and it wouldn’t fit a snack (I don’t like to go anywhere without an apple), and the exact bag but larger would do those things. But for now, I always have a diaper bag with me anyway, and those things can fit there.
Frugal Wins
I took my son downtown on the train for an appointment this past week, and after the appointment I realized one of my gloves was missing. I suspected it’d been dropped at the playground we’d stopped at earlier, which was in the wrong direction and we were running short on time. Immediately I thought I’d just have to order a new pair. However, I decided to walk back to the playground, and it was sitting there sopping wet, having languished in the sleet for an hour. Glad I didn’t have to buy a new pair, glad the pair I have didn’t wind up separately in the trash.
I switched my phone service to Mint, which I’d already been planning to do, on a day my credit card happened to be giving 45,000 bonus points for making the switch. So on top of saving $65 a month on my phone bill with Mint, the points equate to $45 off an upcoming travel expense.
Speaking of travel expenses, we booked a pretty nice hotel suite (a separate room to hang out in after the kid’s 7:30 bedtime is a must) on the Olympic Peninsula for my birthday weekend this summer, entirely with points. We also recently booked flights to San Diego using companion fare for one ticket and miles for another, so for the three of us it was only the cost of one flight plus fees.
I’ve been thinking about trying a shopping/sustainability challenge in the coming year. The past couple years I’ve tried to buy as much secondhand as I can, and that’s something I plan to continue indefinitely. But in 2026 I’m considering expanding on that, and only acquiring things locally, as well as secondhand, whenever possible.
Secondhand or not, I’ve been buying too much stuff and I want that to change. Turns out, it’s actually really easy to browse Poshmark or Mercari or Ebay and find something I absolutely HAVE to have, that I had no idea even existed five minutes before. Or when I otherwise learn of an item I’m interested in, scouring those same sites to see if I can find it secondhand so I can justify buying it, when I still didn’t actually need it or maybe even want it. And it never ends, because there’s always more stuff. I don’t to spend the money, but I’m also tired of spending my time and mental energy thinking about things I’ve convinced myself are missing in my life.
The thing is, I like stuff. I like clothes. I like a comfortable home. I like finding toys I know my kid will be really excited about. But I want to be very intentional about the items I bring in, and impulse buys online – secondhand or not – don’t fit into that. And specifically with secondhand purchases online, if they don’t end up fitting right or I don’t like the color in person or it’s just not what I expected, they usually can’t be returned.
My general shopping strategy is to only buy things I see myself still using in five years. That’s especially true for anything I buy new, but it’s the goal for secondhand items too. That means skipping trends that’ll be out of fashion in three months, it means choosing high-quality items that will last five years, and it means only bringing in things I really, really like. Many of my favorite items have been purchased from Poshmark or similar, but I’ve also wound up with quite a few things I’ve regretted, and then I have to go through the process of finding a new home for them – taking photos, posting on the sites, finding a place to store them, waiting in line at the post office when they do sell – usually at a financial loss. Taking a break from online buying means not just saving money, but also taking a break from all that buyer’s remorse.
I don’t anticipate needing any clothes for myself this year – I have so, so much already – but my son will likely need some things. I’m fortunate to live within walking distance of both a women’s consignment store and a children’s consignment store. A short drive away is a second children’s consignment store and a Goodwill. If I’m looking for something specific for my house or for my kid, Offerup and Facebook Marketplace might have just what I need.
Basically, I’m hoping to extricate myself from the cycle of always wanting something new. I want to be happy with what I have, and to stop thinking so much about stuff. And I want to live a little smaller by lessening my participation in this system where you can dream up a want and have it arrive on your doorstep the next day.
Potholders I recently made as Christmas gifts
There will be a few exceptions to not buying online.
Yarn: I crochet, and I can’t always get the colors I want from a local store. Any crochet project I undertake, I want it to turn out its best and settling for colors I don’t like won’t get me there. I don’t buy plastic yarn, and try to only buy natural fibers from companies known to implement ethical and sustainable practices so I’m already somewhat limited. (I do sometimes buy acrylic yarn scraps from a local second-hand craft supply store!)
Gifts: I would rather buy somebody exactly what they want and will use for years than something that isn’t quite right and they might not love and use. And I do think gifting holidays are a great time to ask for what you really want – I’d like to instill in my kid that we don’t just get everything we want all the time, that new clothes and toys are a sometimes thing. But that if there’s something you do really want, maybe it’s something to ask for for your birthday or for Christmas. That way he (hopefully) learns to value what he does have, really appreciate the times he gets new things, and differentiate real wants from just seeing something cool. And isn’t that how adults should be going about things, too?
A new mattress for my son. We’ll be moving him to a real bed in the spring, and while I happily took in a used race car bed frame I found on Offerup, I’m going to buy a new mattress. We’ll probably order one from Costco.
In addition to sustainability and consuming less overall, I’m also very interested in saving money where we don’t actually want it spent this year. As this stay-at-home-mom experiment goes on longer than we originally planned, I’m grateful we’ve been able to do it and I’m very aware that things like our choice to only have one car, to stay in our small house and to focus our spending on things we truly enjoy (travel, going out for a beer here and there) are what allows it to continue. When the kid gets to be school age, we’ve discussed our hope that I can get a part-time job rather than a full-time job so we don’t have to stress over finding before or after-school care, nobody having time to cook dinner, entire weekends dedicated to the chores we didn’t have time for throughout the week. Or alternatively, spending a small fortune on housekeeping services and meal kits. Our version of “having it all” involves having a little less, so we can have more time.
I plan to keep myself honest here by sharing weekly “buying” posts detailing what I wanted to buy but didn’t, what I did decide to spend extra money on, and maybe some frugal wins (for example, I just moved my phone service from T-Mobile to Mint during a promotion where my credit card was offering 45,000 bonus points for making the switch, so on top of the $65 I’ll save each month on my bill, that’s $45 I can redeem toward an upcoming travel expense). I won’t post our pre-planned grocery trips or mortgage payments or that kind of thing, but I’ll post if I had to run out for additional groceries, if I stopped somewhere for a scone, if I bought anything at Goodwill or if I took my son to the local gymnastics studio’s indoor toddler play hour, an activity that might just allow us to survive the winter. These extras aren’t necessarily things I consider bad, just choices I want to make mindfully.
It’s no secret that we’re constantly bombarded with messages telling us that we should buy more things. That all that stands between our current self and the self we want to be is this ~new thing we don’t have~. And there’s no end to the new things, and the things don’t actually give us what we want, because what we want usually requires taking an action aside from clicking “add to cart.” Purchasing, for example, a new pair of running shoes is an easier way to make ourselves feel like we might become a person who runs than actually getting up and going for a run.
(And personally, I think if there’s a huge gap between what we think we should do and what we actually want to do, we should reassess the things we think we should do. It took me years to accept that I just don’t like to run, but feeling like I should be going for runs kept me from simply going for walks, which I love to do.)
So in that vein, this is a post I’ve been interested in doing for a while, and hope to do regularly: the items I thought I absolutely had to have, but that I resisted buying. Not only do I think it’s valuable to be transparent about how difficult it can be to say no to buying, because I think a lot of us are struggling, but it could be useful to be able to look back and realize “hey, I almost bought that, and I’m glad I didn’t because I found that I really didn’t need it.” And maybe there will be things I wind up buying down the road, which means I’ve really given it some thought and decided it will enhance my life, and I’m okay with that.
And for the record, I do absolutely think things can enhance our lives. But too much energy (and money!) spent on our things, and on thinking about all the things we don’t have but feel like we should have, keeps us from actually living our lives. In so many ways. And anyway, just think about the shitty billionaires losing sleep trying to come up with new ways to manipulate us into spending (at best) our hard-earned money, or (at worst) money we don’t even have yet, on things we don’t need, that won’t make us happy, but always more more more, regardless of the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and an absolute lack of concern for what happens at the product’s end of life (re: it probably can’t be repaired and its carcass probably exists forever). They need us to keep buying at this pace so they can keep getting richer and richer. What if we just stopped? Or at least really, really slowed down?
Speaking of billionaires, the cover photo of this post is a screenshot of something I was happy to see recently – I opened Amazon to look up the details of something I’d purchased in the past, and my order history showed no purchases in the past three months.
So, as promised, here are the items I really wanted to buy this week:
A second Kindle (from FB Marketplace)
Yes, a second Kindle, and here’s why: I almost exclusively read library books on my Kindle, which is great because they’re free and they don’t result in physical objects cluttering my house (though I do make room for books I really do want to own). A lot of people who use Libby for library ebooks are aware of the hack, which Amazon is supposedly trying to come up with a way to stop, where if you check out a book, download it to your Kindle and then put your Kindle in airplane mode the book can’t be removed from the device when it’s due. This gives more time to read the book. As far as the library is concerned, the book has been returned and your copy can be checked out by the next person, so it doesn’t prevent other people from accessing the book. If I’ve got my Kindle in airplane mode when another of my holds becomes available, though, I can’t download it without exiting airplane mode and thus losing my overdue book. So that’s the reason for the second Kindle – one to keep in airplane mode, and one for loading with newly-available books. I like to skip around between several collections of short stories at once rather than reading all of one author’s stories back-to-back, and particularly when reading anthologies I might read a story I like and decide to look for that author’s story collection. I’m not just hoarding a bunch of novels I’m not reading. Additionally, there’s some appeal in the upstairs Kindle/downstairs Kindle model, as a toddler mom who never has long stretches of reading time but gets a few minutes here-and-there throughout the day whenever my kid gets absorbed in some absurd task (a big part of why I’m in my short story era!) and I have still not managed to get into the habit of carrying my Kindle all over the house with me.
I’m also easily persuaded when I find something secondhand, because buying secondhand is giving another life to something – exactly what we should be doing, as much as possible! And Amazon doesn’t make any money when somebody buys an old Kindle on eBay or Marketplace, which is appealing too (and which is one reason these companies often design their products to be irreparable). But the world is full of secondhand items I don’t actually need to own, and a second Kindle is almost definitely one of them.
A coat I really like, in a different color
I’m of the belief that a good coat is a longterm purchase, and if one coat lasts, for example, ten years then two coats should last twenty because you’re wearing each one half as often as you would have. I recently parted ways with a coat I wore exclusively for fifteen years. It was not a good coat in very wet conditions, and it was not a good coat when it was below freezing, and it was not a good coat for above 45-degree temps, but it was a great coat when it was 42 degrees and misty, which it is for much of the year in Seattle. In other words, it was a great everyday coat but there were frequently conditions it wasn’t appropriate for. I replaced that coat with a few coats (some secondhand) that serve different purposes, with one being a really great everyday coat like my old one. It’s on a big holiday sale, and I’ve spent the last week talking myself out of buying it in black too (Mine is brown). I can’t think of a single thing I wear that the brown coat would clash with, and while it’s true that two of the coats would probably last me twice as long as just the one, and being able to choose between the two colors might be nice, it is not a need. It’s an attempt to be prepared for circumstances I haven’t even encountered, which advertisers really want us doing.
The Holdovers DVD
My husband and I have both agreed this relatively-new movie is, in our house, a new Christmas-season must-watch. It’s not available to stream anywhere, so my first instinct was to buy it. After all, we plan to watch it every year and it’s only like $12 at Target. But guess what – the library has it! I placed a hold and it’s available to pick up today. $12 may be cheap, but free is cheaper. Will we buy it someday? Maybe. Do we need to buy it anytime in the next year? No.
Silpats that fit my baking sheets
I don’t bake much, but I’ve made cookies a few times this holiday season and I’ve rediscovered that I really love baking cookies. They’re relatively quick and easy, my kid finds them really exciting, and you can bake just a few while freezing the rest of the dough for later, which means you won’t have a whole batch of cookies sitting around, somehow finding their way into your mouth one after another until they’re all gone. I bake cookies on the Silpats I’ve had for over a decade, which still work just fine. However, they’re smaller than our baking sheets, which means I can’t bake as many cookies at once as my baking sheets would otherwise allow. I was pretty set on requesting new Silpats for Christmas. But how often am I actually trying to bake 20 cookies on one sheet? Hardly ever. Turns out, I don’t actually need to maximize my cookie-baking real estate when half the reason I’m making them is I can bake just a few at a time. And on the rare occasion that I need to bake a lot of cookies, I can bake them in batches. Maybe if my old Silpats give up the ghost I’ll replace them with a different size.
Societally, we’ve developed the mindset that if we have isn’t exactly right, we should just replace it. I’m hoping to leave that mindset behind.
Denise Resting 