![]() I thought I’d come out of it like Joanna Fowler, 31, of Richmond, Va., who said she had always been a careful spender, but became much more militant about budgeting during the pandemic.ĭr. I had expected to emerge from the uncertainty of lockdown the way that people from the Silent Generation emerged from the Great Depression: stoic and thrifty. But in doing so, I noticed that some of the habits I had developed during the pandemic seemed to go beyond making up for lost time. I bailed on the birthday trip and initiated spartan austerity measures to get back on track. My spending had ceased to be something I could ignore. It was going OK, but it was not calm-in-the-face-of-a-possible-recession OK. The previous summer, I had left my full-time job at a magazine to do freelance work. ![]() I was packing for a friend’s birthday weekend in Marfa, Texas, which would culminate in a $125-per-person dinner with a prix fixe menu that did not include drinks, when contemplating the trip’s expenses caused me to swoon like a delicate Victorian woman after a good leeching. Not until November, 20 months after I received a second vaccine dose, did the rubber band finally snap back - or maybe just snap. In the months after I was vaccinated, my percentages were closer to 50 percent spent on my needs, 100 percent set aside for my wants and 0 percent for savings and investing. Majekodunmi recommends using a budgeting framework for your income that splits it into three categories: 50 percent applied to your needs, such as rent 30 percent spent on your wants and 20 percent set aside for savings or investing. Ola Majekodunmi, the founder of All Things Money, a finance site for young adults, explained revenge spending as expenditures meant to make up for “lost time” after an event like the pandemic. I believed my new lust for purchasing would be temporary, my spending stretching thin like a rubber band before quickly retracting to its prepandemic girth once things were “back to normal.” But my “revenge spending” would linger far longer. When I was vaccinated for Covid-19 the next spring, I started buying crop tops, sneakers and bike shorts, and I went out to bars and restaurants again.īut I didn’t stop nesting, and the money I had saved began trickling away, candle by candle, cocktail by cocktail. I began nesting, buying candles and tchotchkes as antidotes to the stale vibes of my home. My good habits dissolved in the fall of 2020. I paid down my credit card balance and began saving in earnest for the first time in years. With bars and restaurants shuttered and no incentive to buy shoes or clothes, my primary indulgences had been nullified. At first, I spent little during the pandemic’s early days.
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