So my husband and I are super frugal, and manage to get by on a very low salary by living within our means and budgeting. Hell, we even manage to save money too. However, we keep running into problems when certain family members basically keep forcing us to spend beyond our means for their various things. For example, picking really expensive restaurants to go to for family celebrations, or having $100 kris kringles at Xmas time, or having to celebrate every single birthday (siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, cousins, etc) with presents, or buy stuff for bridal showers/baby showers/bachelorettes/weddings etc. How can we opt out of all these things and live a truly inexpensive lifestyle when everybody keeps organizing expensive things that we're expected to join in on? Husband and I went through our budget the other day, and realized we end up spending more on obligatory family things each month than we do on ourselves! The thing that prompted this question was receiving an invitation to my sister's 30th birthday party which is at a $70 per person(!!) restaurant, and we all pay for ourselves (no doubt we'll absorb the cost of her meal/drinks too). Between my husband and I that's like... our entire combined weekly food budget.
I should add, that said family members/friends aren't doing this to be greedy or malicious, they just all work in much higher paying jobs than us and for them those costs are not a big deal.
March 30, 2017 at 09:26AM
