It seemed like a good idea at the time.
My wife is no big spender, but during her regular visits to Costco she’s been known to throw this and that into the cart along with items from her list. Problem is, “this and that” at Costco can easily add $50 to your bill.
So when she told me she needed a few things from our favorite bulk food outlet, I offered to go instead. “Just text me your list,” I innocently said.
Driving to work that day left me missing my morning walk to the office. To ensure I hit my mileage for the day, I decided to walk to Costco, pick up the food, walk back to the office, and then drive home.
You Decided to Walk to Costco?
You’re probably asking:
- How far from your office is Costco?
- How did you plan to get the groceries back to your office?
- But, seriously, how were you going to get the groceries back to the office?
My answers:
- Google Maps (which is a lying liar) pegged the distance at 1.4 miles (for a 2.8 mile round trip). As I flashed my membership card to the nice lady at the Costo entrance, my iPhone gps app registered 1.9 miles. Uh oh.
- I had no plan for transporting the groceries back to the office. Actually that’s not true. My brilliant plan was: carry them.
As I headed out of the office, Chance (YNAB COO), said (with some confusion in his voice) “Do you think you maybe want to take your backpack?”
My backpack! No wonder Chance gets the fancy title.
After grabbing my backpack, I confidently strolled out of the office and marched myself to Costco.
I quickly made my rounds through the store, picking up the items on Kate’s list:
- Four loaves of bread.
- A six-pack of Orange juice concentrate.
- A large bag of spinach.
- A big plastic container of grapes.
- A block of Tillamook sharp cheddar.
- And…four dozen eggs.
As I headed to the checkout, my confidence in the mission wavered. The pile of food in my cart seemed like a bad combination of big and heavy.
I checked out, loaded everything into a pretty good-sized fruit box (you know how they do it at Costco) and headed for the door.
Once I cleared the door, I ditched my cart, loaded the spinach and the cheese into the backpack (thanks Chance), which left the juice concentrate, grapes, and the eggs in the box.
Welp, I thought to myself, we’ll see how this goes.
You’ll be shocked to hear the box made for an awkward carry.
I hefted it onto my shoulder, busboy style, and walked about 10 steps. My shoulder tired quickly, and I switched to a more traditional forklift approach.
Ten or twenty more steps, and I was ready to set the box down on the nearest mini-van and call my wife to bail me out.
No! That’s the coward’s way out. Finish the mission.
I made it to a stoplight and rested my load on the crosswalk button. One of my neighbors happened to drive by, giving me a confused look and a wave.
Only then did I realize how ridiculous I must look. Grown man, walking out of the Costco parking lot wearing a stuffed backpack and carrying a large box of groceries on his shoulder.
The light changed; I marched on. After a couple hundred yards I realized the box just wasn’t going to work out – it was too blasted awkward.
Luckily, I was right next to one of the two grocery stores I’d passed on my way to Costco. Did I forget to mention those?
I walked up to the store, set my box down on the ground in front of the big sliding doors, went in and grabbed five or six grocery bags.
Am I shoplifting? I remember wondering.
Back outside, I transferred the eggs, orange juice, and grapes into the bags, and took off, hoping there wasn’t a teen-aged grocery bagger behind me dialing up the cops.
Ahh, yes. The bags made for easier carrying.
Although I do have to hold them out from my sides to keep from banging them into my legs…
And, man, these bags are heavier than I thought. My arms are going numb…
And, hm, I don’t think I got the weight distributed quite evenly between the two bags, and the fingers on my left hand are dangerously close to giving out.
With dead arms and purple fingers, I picked up the pace. Fast enough to cut my time down, but not fast enough to risk blowing out the bottoms of the bags. So, instead of Strange Guy with Backpack and Big Box of Food, I’m now Weirdo Gently Speed-walking with Two Grocery Bags in Each Hand.
Finally I turned a corner and my office came into view.
I shouldered the door open, plodded up the stairs, and unloaded the food in the office’s kitchen area, cursing my own stupidity.
Chance walked by just then, and cheerfully asked “How’d it go?”
Panting and sweating, all I could think to say was,
“I hope the eggs survived.”
Here I am having used YNAB for four years (48 months) and I’m so excited!! In 2007 we paid off our vehicle loans. Then by September of this year we paid off the last of our $32,000 in credit card debt! We have $1000 emergency fund, and $3000 saved toward renovating our kitchen. After getting out of debt, our first goal was to save for matching furniture for the living room; it was going to be a while. On a drop-off visit to Salvation Army, however, I saw a couch and loveseat that almost exactly matched what I was planning to buy! I snatched them up for $250 and started saving for the kitchen.
Feelings…. At first I was in shock. Once I got how it worked and was following the principles I realized how serious my overspending was. I wanted to stick my head back in the sand. But I kept going. I started to see areas were I wasn’t being disciplined enough in my spending. I also felt mad at first because I had to put limits on my spending habits. It felt constraining, then as I got more into it, I started to feel relief, because I knew EXACTLY where my money was going. I felt more relaxed because I am now in control of what my money does.
When we first heard about YNAB we were in desperate need of some financial organization. We had about $33,000 in debt not including our mortgage. We were in the middle of the adoption process for our daughter, which would be adding upwards of $20,000 to debt. Jeremy was in school, completing his Master’s Degree, struggling to pay tuition without accruing any new debt…
Once we had a plan in place, we knew what we had to do and we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We sat down several times a month and talked about how much money was coming in and how it was being spent. We decided together how every dollar would be spent. We stopped pointing the finger at the other person and talked about real and perceived problems. We started managing our money instead of it managing our relationship. We started to trust each other and rekindle those feelings we had for each other when we fell in love 44 years ago. We started using envelopes to manage our cash. We stopped using charge cards.
Before YNAB I lived in the “paycheck to paycheck” world… always worried about the next payment due and wondering if I had enough to avoid another overdraft. I wasn’t sure what my balance was and worried that I might get caught in the “overdraft snowball” that swallows you up and buries you deeper and deeper in debt and frustration…
Without the clear picture that YNAB has provided, this period of unemployment could have been devastating. What is it? 70% of all marriages that fail cite finances as the number one cause of stress? Or maybe the percentage is even higher – but honestly, thanks to YNAB, we have been able to weather this storm. We know what we have, we are not surprised by our bills, we know when we can say yes and when we need to say no. We have had more real living in the past year than we ever have with trips to South Dakota, Magic Mountain, even Disneyland, because we know what the decisions to spend will mean to our overall financial picture. YNAB has truly given us freedom.
