Savings Update: May 2019 New Clothes Hack!
After a rather spendy April, where I only saved 11% of my salary because I paid off a lot of the summer expenses (the Alaska cruise, to be specific), this month I returned to my saving ways. Well, mostly.
So remember how I've radically changed my life? Gone vegetarian/vegan, stopped drinking, started yoga, all that good stuff? It's really not even that hard! This has been great, for so many reasons, but, well, let's just say that these changes have led to a BIT of weight loss. Like a lot. Like, it keeps coming off me. Like none of my clothes are even close to fitting anymore.
I know that sounds like a humble brag, and it TOTALLY is! But I started looking like a little kid playing dress up in his father's clothes, which is not a great look when you're a teacher. The shopper in me was like "GET NEW STUFF, YOU DESERVE IT!" The frugal part of me was like "NO, YOU DESERVE NOTHING!" So my two sides were at an impasse. Fortunately my awesome friend Coleton was like, "Just take your clothes to the tailor and get them taken in, you dummy."
Well, she may not have called me a dummy, but she should have! It was the perfect solution because it was about 1/4 the price of getting new clothes, and I didn't have to contribute to environmental destruction, and I got clothes that fit that I already liked! I did it for almost all my dress shirts and a bunch of pants and polo shirts as well. I did buy one pair of shorts, but they were from recycled fabric, so that's not too bad.
The issue is that even those clothes that I've took in are now, well, too big again. This has led me to a shortfall in the English language. There is no word for something that is both amazing and annoying at the same time. Losing so much weight that I need to get all my clothes adjusted = amazing. Having to keep taking stuff in to get adjusted because you just keep shrinking= annoying.
Help me out dear readers! What word should we invent for this situation? Is there a word in another language that fits the bill?
Even with this, and going out for iftars (it's Ramadan here in the UAE) I was able to save 12,750 AED, or around $3,500 for May. That's a savings rate of 69% and it brings my total saved for the year well past $31,000 with 3 months left until it starts over again!
June should also be a pretty good savings month, even though I have to do a little bit of apartment shopping to fill my new place. More on that in a bit, but I'm experimenting with House Hacking and so far it seems pretty awesome.
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