Live Rich: Live Poor

Swood has a confession…

Susan Wood — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:28:41 +0000

In other news it’s fast approaching the end of Live Rich: Live Poor and so far I’ve stuck solidly to the $30 a week, and for a couple of weeks it went into about $15-$20. Not because I was trying to put the pressure on myself, but because SOCIETY PUT THE PRESSURE ON ME, with the bills and the… bills. Sultana Bran has become really good friends with my stomach, and in the words of my ‘BFF’, Jess, “Sustain can only sustain you for so long” – so true… so true. I like the way I can freely say “I ate cereal for all meals for 5 days because I was that dirt poor” and she can wholeheartedly relate. I have to be honest with you all, $30 a week is not out of my comfort zone. It’s nothing new for me. When I took on this challenge I think my biggest hurdle was stopping eating out. Which I have to admit right now, I’ve fallen from the tower a couple of occasions. mainly one particular day where my friend, Megan in Tasmania*, came up or.. back from her trip and I felt very self-concious not eating anything as a way of socialising. So I had a couple of cupcakes and a jelly tea. It was silly and if we do this again, I’ll have to be more diligent about this. Eating out is just far too tempting… even just snacking. And on things I’m not allowed to eat! Pathetic.

Also on www.steeplechaser1.wordpress.com

Week One

Susan Wood — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:17:25 +0000

LIVE RICH:LIVE POOR – WEEK ONE (well, almost) with Susan Wood

Sunday: relatively spend free. In fact, it was completely spend free. I considered buying something to eat at Coles before radio but that goes against the rule about not buying anything that’s not groceries.
Money spent = 0

Monday: Went from the Mountains to Sydney so I bought a train ticket. Also, my dear friend who owns a coffee shop near Katoomba Railway Station handed me a free hot chocolate (friends in hospitality = awesome-o)
As soon as I got to Sydney, I did feel very wrong not buying a jelly tea from Easyway because it’s what I always do, instead I just went straight to my place.
Money spent = $2.50

Tuesday: Went up the street to see my friend and forgot to eat beforehand or bring anything with me. I was pretty much starving and it was rather evil being surrounded by Norton Street cafes. She bought me a juice. We alternate buying each other juices so I’m trying to figure out how i’m going to tell her I can’t do that… particularly friendly thing next week. I feel lame.
Money spent = 0

Wednesday: Okay, so my mother likes jelly tea and tells me to bring some for her when I come back to the mountains. And, then I bought myself one. hat day was my birthday and so I figured I could do a little splurging. Mum pretty much made up for the tea buying by handing me money as a means of saying she’s technically paid for it. However I did buy The Australian, and another train ticket
Money spent = $4.00

Thursday: apart from the grocery shopping, I went to the gym. I figured this was more of a medical need than a wanting to be fit (trust me, it’s impertive that I not be a heffer), still, it’s a non-accomodation/non-food/non-water ‘essential’ so…
Money spent = $20.00

Friday: Back in the city, bought train ticket
Money spent = $2.50

Tomorrow (Saturday): I’m going to Fox Studios so I plan on busing it there. I also plan on eating some huge dinner before hand and only drinking water or any free non-alcoholic drink I can score at the Mardi Gras after party (of which I didn’t pay for! Hurrah!)
Money spent= $2.50

Total spending = $31.50

Eff. I went over but $1.50… If I hadn’t had bought that damn newspaper I would have met the goal. Oh well, I’ll just deduct it from next week’s budget.

So the things I’ve learned from week one is that I can, in fact, go places if they are free.
Bringing your own food is really weird and I feel a bit like I’m in school and mum’s made me lunch.
People can’t get over that you’ve brought your own food.

But my awesome-o meal (it’s not just some lame sandwich) cost me a grand total of $5 and their meal was something like $20.
I also think that I spend most of my money on take away food. Well, not this week, obviously, but it just never occurs to me how much I eat. Well, not the quantity as such, more the price of the food itself. I know you have to factor in a whole lot of things into the price but really, I spend far too much money on take out food when I could just not do that and actually pay a bill on time (here’s to awaiting the pay-bill-on-time day!).
There has also been a great deal of tempting consumer items I would have liked to purchase but had to hold back on, and again, I found that pretty hard. Then I thought about even if I was about to buy those millions of hair clips, I’ve already got heaps in my draws at home that I have to wear all at once there’s so many.
Bit of a waste of money, to be honest.

This is also on www.steeplechaser1.wordpress.com

Government Aid

Erin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:45:29 +0000

I just found this handy nugget of information on the AusAid website:

How much Australia spends

In 2008-2009 Australia will provide $3.7 billion worth of official development assistance.

All Australians contribute to Australia’s aid program. Every week, each of us puts in around $2.40 to pay for our aid program – about the cost of a loaf of bread a week. This amounts to around 1% of Federal Government expenditure compared to the 42% spent on social security and welfare.

The ratio of Australia’s aid to Gross National Income (GNI) for 2008-09 is estimated at 0.32 per cent, an increase from 0.30 per cent in 2007-08.

.32%. In 1970, we committed to giving 0.7% of our GDP to Foreign Aid by the mid-70s, along with most other developed nations, by the mid-70s. It never happened. Only FIVE countries in the world met that commitment in 2007. The US gave .16%.

So here’s the deal. Right now, I’m committing the meet my share of the 0.7%. I did the maths, and if $2.40 a week is .3%, then $5.60 is 0.7%. The gap is $3.20. So, right now, I am setting up a weekly donation to the UN World Food program for $3.20. And you know what? I have a larger share of the tax burden then most, so I’m going to cover a couple of kids or uni students who don’t earn anything- lets just round it up to $10 total.

$10 a week. That really isn’t a lot of money. Three coffees, half a movie, 2/3 of an album on iTunes.

So why not do the same? Commit to meeting your share. The government isn’t doing enough, that is true. So lets do more ourselves.

Then, lets TELL them they aren’t doing enough. Write to your local representative. Urge them to think about the importance of the millennium development goals and how much we give in aid toward them.

This stuff is too important to ignore. People are dying. As many children die every year from preventable water diseases as people died in the holocaust. And we are letting this happen.

Day One

Erin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:29:12 +0000

Today is the first day that Swood and I will be doing “Live Rich:Live Poor”. Live Rich: Live Poor is, for want of a better term, a challenge that encourages us to think about how much money we spend needlessly. The challenge is, after you pay your bills (real bills, not “bills” meaning payments on laybys and that sort of thing), you try to live on as little money as possible. We’ve put a cursory $30/week amount on it- I’m hoping to buy all my food and bits and pieces with that.

I’ve lately become increasingly aware of the fact every purchase I make is a decision. It’s a decision about how I want to spend my money. That seems simple. But it’s also a decision about how I don’t want to spend my money. It’s a choice. I have a finite resource, and my choices about how I allocate it are an important decision. Like it or not, they reflect my priorities and my values. I talk about universal equality (something I do believe) and our responsibility to fellow humans, but every time I make a decision to spend money on myself, I’m effectively undermining that belief.

That being said, this $30 challenge is only due to last for a month. I’m hoping, through it, I will learn to be more frugal and to save more money in order to donate it to charities. People often say “I have no spare money”, but when you actually look at how you spend every penny, a lot is wasted. On $80 hand cream, or $4 coffees every morning. On going to the movies three times in a week. On buying fruit and vegies they then let go to waste because they’re not organised enough to cook them in time.

We are spoilt. I certainly am. I have everything I need. And most of what I want.

And that’s part of the challenge: reassessing the term “need”. What is it that we actually need? Peter Singer writes in his new book, The Life You Can Save, that if you are drinking anything besides tap water, you are catering for a want instead of a need, and you have money to spare. Extreme? Perhaps. But I do think he has a point.

Anyway, over the next month, I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop about how it’s going. A big challenge for me will be eating well for such a small amount of money, but I’m sure it can be done.

Oh, and the money I save not buying crap? Half will go to charity:water australia.

Day One: total money spent $0

Cross-posted to: All Good Naysayers, Speak Up!

Beginnings…

Susan Wood — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:50:34 +0000

Erin and I were discussing materialism yesterday. Not the usual splurges on nothing you really need or food or liquid you consume, but materialism in relation to the Victoria bushfires.
As devastating as the bushfires are in Victoria and the lives lost is absolutely horrendous, it once again, puts into perspective about just how invaluble posessions are and how quickly they can be lost. It also puts into perspective just how much people spend fawning over their posessions as if they’re real people.Last time I checked, real people are real people.

It’s such a pain in the arse listening to people constantly talking about the following things -
1) How much money they earn
2) How much money they’ve just spent
3)How much money they plan on spending in the immediate future.
4) The culmination of 1-3 and then including talking about all the STUFF they’ve just bought.

Because reality check – no one cares. Maybe if you stopped to start talking about yourself as a person and not the money you earn or spend, you’ll come to the following conclusions -
1) You’re really quite boring.
2) there is no number 2 worse enough to make number 1 look vaguely alright.

This is really a bane on my existence. It really highlights just how little people realise just how immediately disposable everything you own is. I have a lot of constant, personal family connections/issues that deal quite heavily with poverty that keep me grounded to the real world by making me physically and financially take part in, and highlight exactly what the western world is simply taking for granted or not bothering to really deal with.

So what about all these real people?

Look around the room your in now and don’t forget to include the computer your looking at. There are people who’ve never even seen anything even remotely close to what you own. Or live in anything remotely like the house/apartment/mansion you live in.
They wouldn’t know what the food you eat even looks like or tastes like, let alone knowing what it’s called.
You’re spending money at a pub in one night that families wouldn’t see in accumulation in a year, possibly more.
See the clothes you own? How much did you pay for that on item of clothing? What? $200?
Do you see what I’m getting at?

The real question here is what are you spending your money on?

Erin and I started talking about what exactly is ‘essential’ versus what do you spend at a whim due to our own gluttonous, greedy freedom to spend on whatever the hell we want to without holding back (this includes buying more food just after you’ve already eaten because it ‘looks good in the window’).

Erin put essential necessities down to the following:
Food
Water
Accomodation

It’s true, everything else is just something you wanted.

So, Susan, what is the point of this blog?

Well, I’d like to assume that you’ve already reflected on the things you own by now and reflected on the amount you’ve spent and you’ve now concluded that you own too much crap and you spend your money on far too many unnecessary items and you’ve also concluded that lives being saved and helped is worth more than a luxury item you’ll forget about 10 seconds after you’ve come home.

So this is the plan:
Live Rich/Live Poor is Erin’s brain-child essentially about you taking a long, hard look at yourself and examining your spending habits through the month of February and then in March after your bills, rent and grocery shopping anything that isn’t absolutely essential you’ll have a maximum of $30 a week to spend and you have to be diligent about it. Which would mean actually making your food and taking it with you, if you get hungry again during the day because you saw something that you think is tasty too effing bad. You should have packed more.
It’s about being minimal with your spending.
So what do you do with all the money you haven’t spent on an outrageous amount of alcohol?
Give it to someone who can use it.
There’ll be information of the Live Rich: Live Poor blog in upcoming days.

FACT: One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes. In total 270 million people, have died as a result of poverty since 1990.

But I love money and spending and, it’s oh such a sacrifice.

Sometimes, I’m asked how you can have a God that allows this to happen. But really, what I should be asking you is how you stand by and allow this to happen. You have the means, and you have a semblance of common sense and, I hope, a vague knowledge of what you think is right and wrong. The only one getting cheated by cheating at the plan is going to be yourself.

And if that isn’t enough for your brain to come to terms with, because your life is just so hard, why not read this happy article, or these happy percentages.

I guess, at a more local level, this is also a learning curve into actually taking time to recognise the people you know and the people around you and perhaps spend more time getting to know them on a person-to-person level (and I mean actually in person), reconnecting with your own community and seeing where you can help. Contribution to a community doesn’t need to be restricted to where the community is.

I’m secretly hoping that this will gather support.

Last time I checked, real people are real people.

So what about all these real people?

The real question here is what are you spending your money on?

Erin put essential necessities down to the following:
Food
Water
Accomodation

It’s true, everything else is just something you wanted.

FACT: One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes. In total 270 million people, have died as a result of poverty since 1990.

And if that isn’t enough for your brain to come to terms with, because your life is just so hard, why not read this happy article, or these happy percentages.

I’m secretly hoping that this will gather support.

The Rules

Erin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:37:01 +0000

Your basic necessities in life come down to three things:

Food

Water

Accomodation

Everything else is pretty much a want (it’s a grey area when you discuss the need for transportation to let’s say, work or study)

So you have $30 to spend a week.
Sure, you can spend it. On everything except for the following things:

Take away food/Beverages
Alcohol
Any unnecessary items you don’t really need

Quite simple really.

Hello world!

Erin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:31:20 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

The Challenge

Susan Wood — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:30:23 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We’re looking at examining the spending habits of an ordinary person living in a financially, medically, endlessly available situation and wondering if you’re willing to cut down on your luxury spending to give some money to people in nations who desperately need your help.

I know – these problems can’t been solved in one go, and very likely won’t be solved completely, but it shouldn’t stop you from taking time out to cut back the six coffees a day you buy to use that money to provide a village with the basic necessities such as clean water, food and a proper place to live.

It’s really a self-examinination of want vs need:How much did you spend today?

Did/Do you really need it?

It’s a self-examination of how many times you use the word ‘need’ as a subconscious excuse to purchase items you just really wanted.

Once you look at the rules, I’d like to think that also a challenge to see how you socialise under these constraints. Don’t assume that going out and spending far too much money is the only way to get together. Be more adventurous.

During the month of March we’re putting to you a challenge to Spend Less to Give More.

We strongly encourage you, with the money you haven’t spent, to give to a charity you think will use 100% of your donations effectively.
For the month of March we’re featuring Charity: Water who are a non-profit dealing with the distribution of clean drinking/bathing water to developing nations.

Further on we’ll mention more humanitarian organsations who play a really huge role in helping people in need.