A few years ago, when we started talking about retirement in earnest, and it started getting closer, we made a conscious decision to curtail our spending, and only buy that which we needed. It wasn’t like we bought a whole lot of things anyway, but this just took it to the next level.

We don’t spend a lot on clothes and shoes. The missus made do with better clothes rotation to give the impression of different outfits, but in reality, it was the same clothes with a different mix of tops and bottoms, and or a different scarf of some other accessory. I bought a number of shirts on sale at JCPenney and have extended my wardrobe that way. I have two pair of shoes – loafers – that will easily last a couple years. Then they get replaced with shoes that will last another couple of years. I don’t go to work for the fashion show, so I don’t really care if I wear the same outfit every X number of days.

While this sort of goes back to the some of the spending posts, the spending decision became part of our retirement plan. One advantage to this is when retirement rolls around, the attitude toward spending won’t need to be altered too much, if at all. This ties into budgeting as well. If we find out that we have more income than expenses, maybe we’ll do a little more shopping. But we like experiences and travel, and I think we’re more apt to take another trip, or spend another night or two on a trip, than to buy one more tchotchke to sit on a shelf.

There is an entire industry around Americans owning too much. It is the self-storage industry. Do you have a garage that doesn’t have a car in it? Do you have a neighbor like that? Or do you drive down a road somewhere and see a car in a driveway, and open garage door, and the garage filled with things that aren’t vehicular? Sure, there are some that just, honestly, have a house that is too small – maybe they have kids and a lot of toys, and or no basement. But let’s be serious, how many of those garages packed with junk fall into that category? I bet there are more that fall into that category because people like to shop, rather than they don’t legitimately have enough room.

In summary, I don’t anticipate our spending changing much. As mentioned above, it may go up based on excess income, but buying stuff for the sake of buying it will [continue to] not be missed.