So I needed a new bookcase, but as you know it is
never just about the bookcase...this is the story of how I learned to love my ugly, mismatched, and old furniture. I have been spending too much time over at
ApartmentTherapy.com, they have some beautiful and smartly decorated little homes over there. Everyone has a sexy and cute house with thoughtful knickknacks and small pets. Most of the houses don't even have bookcases but just playful assortments of magazines and coffee tables books. So aside from throwing out my entire book collection I had to find another way to achieve this wonderful world of glossy apartments. I decided that I needed a new bookcase to calm my nerves and get closer to apartment zen.
Well this began the search for something made of wood. Who would have guessed that wood furniture is totally passe? Well apparently wood furniture is for people who want to "invest" in "real" furniture. So this relegated me to the eschilons of people investing in chip board laminated or veneered furniture. For some reason this completely depressed me. I hate to spend little dribbles of money here and there on something destined for the garage dump. But then I realized aren't we all destined for that big garbage dump in the sky eventually?
So instead of buying something new, I decided just to look at people with uglier furniture than me. Ah, I feel better, don't you?
The Ugliest Couches in the world, contest and gallery
...and here is another reason to feel smug about not buying anything new.
Saving $10 is far different than spending $10Spend $10 Today, Be Out $100K Tomorrow by Jeffrey Strain May 5, 2008There is often a false assumption that saving $10 and spending $10, although opposite, are relatively the same. For example, if a person saves $10 a day, after a month their account will have $300 while if a person spends $10 a day, that will result in a debt of $300. While on the surface this makes perfect sense, the problem lies in that these numbers fail to take into account the interest that can be gained or charged on this money. It is this failure to understand the concept of compound interest and the dramatic effect it can have that greatly changes these results.
"It's important to understand that it takes very little to start sinking into debt. For most people, spending $10 a day would not be considered extravagant spending by any means, but $10 can result in tens of thousands of dollar of debt. It's simple to see when you compare the results of what happens when one person saves $10 a day while the other spends $10 a day that he doesn't have.
If a person were to save $300 a month (approx. $10 a day) and invest it to get a 5% yearly return, that person would have $20,402 in the bank after five years. On the other hand, if a person ends up spending $300 a month more than he has and puts it onto a credit card that he doesn't pay off over the same 5 year period, that person will owe $36,259, assuming a 26% credit card interest rate. After five years, the difference between saving $10 and spending $10 each day results in a $56,661 gap in net worth between the two.
Add another five years to the same patterns, and the results are even more dramatic. After 10 years, the person who saved $10 a day would have $46,585 in the bank, whereas the person whop spent the $10 he didn't have would be $167,470 in debt, resulting in a net worth difference of over $210,000."
