How do you decide how to spend your money?

Like many people in the United States, I am coping with the powerlessness I feel about the broader political situation by participating in boycotts.

Economic blackout? Easy.

No shopping at Target? Say less.

I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription and went cold turkey on Whole Foods.

I deleted Instagram and avoided re-downloading TikTok.

It’s a convenient moment for me to scrutinize my consumption patterns. Now that I’m living on billable hours instead of a monthly salary, I’m even less tolerant of waste in my household budget. With every portion of every day squarely within my control, I care more about how I spend each block of my time—whether it’s working, resting, writing, painting, reading, or doom-scrolling until my brain becomes jello.

How we choose to spend our energy is power.

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Fifteen years ago, when I was graduating college, the mantra of the moment was, “Shop Small, Buy Local.” Bolstered by campaigns like “Small Business Saturday,” the trend was all about celebrating indie artists and craftsmanship.

Why buy from a big box store when you could get a handmade owl necklace on Etsy?

I saw documentaries about how Wal-mart hurt inventors and decimated communities. The message stuck with me.

When I learned Chick-fil-A was funneling money to conversion therapy organizations through the WinShape foundation, I decided, “Those greasy peanut-oil chicken biscuits didn’t taste that good, anyway.”

And that’s the thing about boycotts: it’s easy to stop shopping with a business when you don’t need what they’re selling.

Thanks to the magic of YNAB, I know I spent exactly $694.22 at Target last year. I bought some art supplies to entertain kids at a party, materials for a workshop, new Pyrex, a glass carafe, storage bins, gift wrap, twelve matching bowl plates and a Lodge Dutch Oven for gumbo Christmas Eve dinner.

With a little planning in advance, I could have picked up all of these items either:

• Direct from a brand online (Pyrex, Lodge), or
• From an alternative chain store (BLICK, CB2, Dollar Tree)

If I wanted to source a Lodge product through a mom and pop like Church Street Market on the Square, I bet they’d put in an order for me. For things like gift wrap or servingware, I could track down artisanal products, albeit at a higher price point.

When I go to a Target, what I’m actually buying is convenience. I need this thing and I have waited until the last minute.

So, when Target announces it’s going to roll back its DEI initiatives, it’s easy for me to say, “You know what? Not worth it.”

Convenience doesn’t justify supporting a business that doesn’t align with my values—especially if I can get similar products somewhere else. If I never step foot in a Target store again, I’ll be happier for it.

But what if the product is really good and there’s nowhere else to get it?

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There are two butcher shops in my neighborhood. The one closer to my house is a nice little one stop shop. You can pop in, grab a few steaks, a handful of asparagus, a bottle of wine. They’ve got specialty cheese, marinated anchovies, and goods from local bakeries. It’s a welcome addition.

But the other butcher shop has better sausages, better bacon, and a more reliable seafood selection. If I’m making shrimp and grits, red beans and rice, or any of that rich, traditional Southern food, I gotta drive out to the other shop.

Now, I strongly suspect the other shop is run by the fuzz. They’ve got a thin blue line sticker on the front door and they’re always posting American flags on Instagram. I have a feeling the employees would laugh off the idea of being Covid-conscious. I don’t want to know what they think about Cop City.

But as long as I don’t pry, I can pretend they’re just a bunch of steely men who are passionate about good cuts of meat.

If, for some god-forsaken reason, I was called to boycott this particular shop, I would not have comparable products available to substitute. I would need to stop making recipes that require andouille. I would have to do without decent brats for the grill. This would hurt.

When we know better, we do better. Help me because sometimes I don’t want to know!

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I’m currently working through The Artist’s Way with a group. In the tasks for Week Five (spoiler alert if you’re planning to dive into this) one of the Tasks is to write down a list of ten things you’d like to own.

I struggled with this task.

10 whole things??

Overwhelmingly, my life is over-abundant in things. I have more clothes than I can wear and more household items than I can store. The car in the driveway is paid off and it runs fine.

Other than the health and wellbeing of my family members, the only thing I actually want is the financial freedom to greenlight our home addition and renovation.

Alas! The stars have shifted and things are still not aligned. Tariffs are scary. Costs for labor and lumber are uncertain. Project estimates keep ticking up, and we need cash in the bank—assuming it’ll even be FDIC-insured tomorrow.

Continuing to defer our home addition makes general improvements complicated.

We’ve got immediate issues. The flimsy back wall of the house is rotting off. The fence is about to fall over. I’m not sure how many times we can keep patching the roof.

The bathroom exhaust fans need to be replaced but can only be installed through the attic unless we also want to re-do the ceilings. The kitchen floors are peeling. The refrigerator leaks. The oven surface has been cracked.

I’d love to build new shelves in the bedroom closet but it’s no use because we’re planning to move the circuit breaker panel when we add on a new utility room.

The whole interior of the house could benefit from crown molding and a coat of fresh paint. (I accidentally bumped the ceilings with the roller when we moved in. The spots have been driving me nuts for 12 years.)

Rebuilding the front porch steps after they rotted through.

Every short-term repair cuts into the cash fund for the big work we want to do in the future. If we break the project into chunks, we end up paying for a lot of expensive things twice.

Imagine spending $30,000 on a fence knowing you’ll end up ripping 40 feet of it apart to lay down a new driveway. Imagine buying two new roofs.

It’s not like we can pick up and relocate to another place in the neighborhood. Our location is primo and five minutes from family. Surrounding home prices are bonkers. We bought low at a good time with chump change as a down payment. We refinanced at a rate that’s too good to lose. We just seriously underestimated how much it would cost to fix up our little money pit.

All we can do is stay put, keep saving, and wait for the chaos to settle down.

In the meantime, there’s nothing new I could possibly want to own. Every unnecessary purchase is stealing from my dreams.

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The unfortunate part of this story is: maybe I could be cooking dinner in my renovated dream kitchen right now if I hadn’t been so irresponsible with my cash over the past few years. Coming out of the pandemic lockdowns, I over-corrected. We took impulsive trips to fun places. Got tickets to a Broadway show. Ate Michelin-Star sushi. I bought lots of fancy costumes to wear outside for parties and sports and various activities.

I was frivolous.

I was trying to buy us “great experiences” because life is short and tomorrow isn’t promised. (Not wrong.)

But what happens when you go from massively over-consuming to buying practically nothing?

How do you fill your time and light up your brain?

✤

How did I used to spend my time back when I was twenty two and broke as a joke?

I worked as many hours as I could handle, at as many jobs as I could find. (Not always well.)

I spent late nights at the pub, singing karaoke, or sitting around a bonfire in somebody’s yard.

I spent afternoons wandering the flea markets, collecting questionable art and imperfect furniture.

I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t bored. My body ran on the fumes of stress, always one unexpected car repair away from not making rent.

I was hungry, but I didn’t starve. I subsisted on stale croissants (job #1), movie theatre popcorn (job #2), and tubs of hummus which I paid for with quarters in the slot of the self-checkout machine.

What I had then that I don’t have now is hope that things could get better in the future. When I was out of everything, I could live on hope.

In the absence of hope, we have to cultivate faith instead.

Faith that if we wander too far down the wrong path, we may encounter a tree to climb that will let us find a new way through the woods.

Or, if we happen to be stuck in that deep hole without a ladder again, faith for a downpour of rain that could let us swim our way up to the top.