Flower Show

Spent some money this past Sunday. Went to the Philadelphia Flower Show (2 advance purchase tickets @$18.00 each= $36.00), where we enjoyed dozens of beautiful displays to help chase away the blues of this cold, snowy, endless winter. We also spent close to $100.00 on various plants and seeds. None of this was put on charge cards, so our debt did not go up.

Our urban house has a small back yard, and every year we spend a couple hundred dollars creating a garden to enjoy from spring until autumn. Yes, we could make a very colorful garden with just some flats of inexpensive pansies, petunias and impatiens for a couple dozen dollars, but we enjoy the creative pleasure of designing a garden with many different visual elements. Our garden is a small extravagance which gives us much enjoyment all summer long.

Still, it is an extravagance, and with a debt of $22,914.72, there is no such thing as having truly 'disposable income.' The rational thing to do with whatever money is left over after meeting our monthly expenses is to use it to further pay down the debt. Well, to hell with rational. I never claimed to be rational. Besides, if everyone started making rational spending decisions, our national economy would crash so hard it would make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like losing a dropped quarter down a sidewalk grate. Consumer spending makes up three-quarters of our economy, and a good part of those consumer dollars are spent on irrational choices.

The money we spend on our garden falls into the category I call 'experiential' rather than purely material. Our plants will provide us pleasure this year through the constantly changing tableau they give us, but then they will fade away, leaving us only with memories. Experiential purchases can be sensory, like flowers or meals in restaurants. They can be educational, like books or taking classes. They can be risks taken to better your life, such as borrowing money to start a business. Much of our credit card debt is made up of such items (read more about what makes up our debt here).

I can be pretty judgmental when it comes to what people spend their money on. Our debt has been built on our desire to live our life the way we want, to travel, to learn, to participate in making the world better, and I am comfortable with the risk of having taken on this debt in pursuit of those goals. But I know people who have built similarly huge credit card debt simply through the purchase of objects, and to me this seems foolish, selfish and meaningless, filling your life with things in place of truly living it.

But how can we draw a line between righteous purchases and foolish ones? Our garden is mostly a private pleasure, enjoyed only by ourselves and a handful of friends and neighbors. Yes, it feeds our souls, both in its inherent beauty and in giving us a creative outlet, and through feeding our souls it helps us be better people. But is that enough? Why not donate that money to charity, or at least use it to pay down the debt so as to free us to do more with our lives?

I criticized people who would spent $76,800. on a Patek Philippe watch when you can get one for five bucks, or even $800 if you wanted to go crazy (read it here). But I defend our spending $200 on our garden when $25 worth of inexpensive flowers could suffice. Someone having trouble putting food on the table might jeer at our priorities.

There are no simple answers to these questions. The best we can do is to be fully aware of how we spend our money, to examine our personal reasons for buying something, the alternative uses for the money we are spending, and the consequences our purchases have on the environment, the economy and society. Consumption is not inherently bad. Self-interest is not inherently bad. We do not necessarily need to feel guilty for having more money to spend than other people. Nevertheless, thoughtless consumption, greed and self-absorbed disregard for others is bad, and I fear it is increasingly rampant.

There has been a lot in the news over the past year about greed and corruption in corporate boardrooms. Scandals like Enron, Worldcom and Tyco, where corporate CEOs seem more concerned with enriching themselves at the expense of their employees, their stockholders and society in general, have led to calls for codes of ethics to be more strictly applied and strictly enforced in the way companies are managed.

I'm all for that. But I also believe that we as consumers must develop a code of ethics as well. One of the goals of DebtorsPrison is to develop tools and guidelines we can use to examine what we buy and why we buy it. The marketing wizards who push more and more products down our throats don't want us thinking too hard about our purchases. We need to take back our brains, our hearts and our souls.