It’s April 1st and I’m nervous. For the next 30 days, I’m only permitting myself to spend money on the necessities of life: groceries, toiletries, and car and home expenses. No take-out. No books. No because-I-deserve-it items. This is partly to reprimand my recent spending behaviour and mostly about forcing a strong reset. A little discipline can’t hurt.
Although retail experienced a huge contraction in the first few months of the pandemic, total retail services excluding food services were up 6.3% in December 2020 compared to December 2019. Further, companies in the Consumer Discretionary sector in the S&P 1500 reported a one-year revenue growth of 5.6% in Q4 2020.
My hunch is that we aren’t buying less, but rather buying different products. Investing in home offices, materials for home improvement projects, and so forth. I’ve purchased an iMac for the first time! If I’m going to be forced into staring at a screen, it might as well be a big one with a webcam and speakers pre-installed.
Anyways, I’ll write about my journey but I can already tell you that just knowing that I can’t buy anything has made it emotionally difficult because now I want to buy something. Oh boy. It’s going to be a long month.
Jennifer