How Have Your Spending Habits Changed?

[Moonface]

Was reading some comments about that stupid price increase to PS+ that goes live in five days while trying to decide what I'm doing for dinner tonight (I have not yet made a choice in that matter) and thought of places I no longer get food from because it isn't worth the money to me anymore, which led to the idea for this thread.

To get specific about what places I don't really get food from anymore, I won't go to places like Chick-fil-A since it feels like the quality went to pot and even if it didn't it feels incredibly expensive now for what you get in a meal. I also don't really like going out to sit down restaurants as much now either because prices going up plus tips trying to push beyond 20% makes that activity feel like a luxury now rather than just a thing I could consider doing once a week without thinking much more about it.

I also don't really go grocery shopping in the store I work for anymore either because of how high the prices have risen. Nowadays I try to get most of my stuff from Aldi, then Winn-Dixie, and only use Target and Publix for good sales or items I can only get from those stores (mostly Publix for their British section I buy a few things from).


Also this thread doesn't have to be for changes in spending habits over the last few years (although most changes are probably going to fall into that time period) but for any time in your life. Just in case my stories make it seem this thread is focused on a specific time period.

[Kyng]

I spend quite a lot less on games than I used to . Much of that is down Steam: instead of going out and buying a brand new game for £30, I'll go online and buy an older game for £5.

However, I'm spending quite a bit more on travel and eating out. Being in a long-distance relationship does that!

[Mr EliteL]

For food and other such grocery shopping I'm more open to buying the store's own brand when I used to try and avoid them, except for meat, fruit, veg or milk which I would buy before.

I'd say spend less on gaming but er...I'll go with not buying multiple games in a year. Then again my amount of games per systems are probably of a similar number anyway so maybe not really? Well majority apart from PS5 where I have currently only two and one is free to play (initially).

Can say I don't really buy DVDs/Blu Ray anymore unless it's something I'm really into like a band's live show or a film I definitely will watch again but even those had been relegated to being a gift from someone at birthday/Christmas.

Also used to be in a phase of I must buy merch of something I like (anime/game) in the early to mid 2010's but that fizzled down to the odd thing here and there. Not going to a convention helps that too although I'll still try and get at least one thing if I went to remember the event, but has to be something from a series I like of course.

[Moonface]

I spend quite a lot less on games than I used to . Much of that is down Steam: instead of going out and buying a brand new game for £30, I'll go online and buy an older game for £5.

Same here, although not with Steam games but console games. After being burned by sequels I was excited for that I bought at either full price ($70) or on a big discount (like $30) it's made me really skeptical about paying full price for any new release, to the point I wasn't even going to touch LoZ: Tears of the Kingdom at launch despite enjoying BotW because I just didn't want to trust the game wouldn't do something in the final third to really disappoint me (especially since BotW didn't exactly have an impressive ending itself) or just feel too similar to BotW because of using the same world map as that game without enough meaningful alterations or new content. Lies of P comes out later this month and despite enjoying the demo I currently don't desire to buy it at launch until I see whether or not the game avoids massively dropping the ball at some point for the reasons that 1) I'm tired of getting really into a game and then it falling apart in the late-game and 2) games going up in price but delivering more disappointments for me just feels like paying more money for an inferior experience overall compared to the game that came before it.

However, I'm spending quite a bit more on travel and eating out. Being in a long-distance relationship does that!

Well depending on how often you're doing that, you could always try looking at it that it isn't coming out to as much money as it feels if you spread that cost out across the time between those moments. It cost me and @ShiraNoMai a lot to meet up when we would (especially due to being in different countries entirely) but doing it at most twice a year made the sometimes eye watering prices of plane tickets work out to something a lot easier to swallow when say, $600 is spread out to a 6+ month period rather than a 2 week period (since we weren't really having to spend money on each other in the periods outside of being together in person).
Spreading out costs across a time period is something I try to do with anything when I can though since if something costs a lot up front but works out cheap in the long run (such as bulk buying certain items from Costco) then I don't get as bothered by seeing a large price tag on something.

For food and other such grocery shopping I'm more open to buying the store's own brand when I used to try and avoid them, except for meat, fruit, veg or milk which I would buy before.

Assuming it hasn't changed since I was buying it, Asda would be generally pretty solid all around for any of their own-brand meat products I'd buy, including some of their Smart Price (SP) stuff. The SP bacon back when I got it was way better quality than any of the "proper" cuts of bacon because there was rarely any fat on it as it was just random sized cuts of bacon meat that wouldn't be suitable cuts for a typical back bacon rasher. I never once touched any other bacon after getting that stuff.

Can say I don't really buy DVDs/Blu Ray anymore unless it's something I'm really into like a band's live show or a film I definitely will watch again but even those had been relegated to being a gift from someone at birthday/Christmas.

Also used to be in a phase of I must buy merch of something I like (anime/game) in the early to mid 2010's but that fizzled down to the odd thing here and there. Not going to a convention helps that too although I'll still try and get at least one thing if I went to remember the event, but has to be something from a series I like of course.

Yeah I haven't bothered buying physical media for shows and movies in forever really. Anything I've seen that I like enough to watch again would usually air on TV regularly at some point and if not I could just stream it, but I haven't really cared about any movie enough anymore to watch it more than one time, and the same for anime and other shows. I tend to just move on and put my time into something new instead.

Merch buying for me will be more impulse heavy if the item is going to be hard to get down the line or if I know it'll be a limited run thing. I'd say the heaviest moment I had of doing that sort of purchasing was when Crash and Spyro were yet to make their comebacks and merch was coming out for them that I had no idea would be more than that one or two things, and is the main reason I own a $500+ Spyro resin statue. Had I known at the time smaller, cheaper PVC statues would come out for Spyro in the following years there's a high chance I wouldn't have bought that, but at the time for all I knew that statue was going to be a one and done piece of Spyro merch and nothing else was going to be made by anyone anywhere as the Crash and Spyro remakes had yet to happen.

[Kyng]

Well depending on how often you're doing that, you could always try looking at it that it isn't coming out to as much money as it feels if you spread that cost out across the time between those moments. It cost me and @ShiraNoMai a lot to meet up when we would (especially due to being in different countries entirely) but doing it at most twice a year made the sometimes eye watering prices of plane tickets work out to something a lot easier to swallow when say, $600 is spread out to a 6+ month period rather than a 2 week period (since we weren't really having to spend money on each other in the periods outside of being together in person).
Spreading out costs across a time period is something I try to do with anything when I can though since if something costs a lot up front but works out cheap in the long run (such as bulk buying certain items from Costco) then I don't get as bothered by seeing a large price tag on something.

Yeah, that's certainly true.

She lives about 3 hours away from me by train, so each trip costs about £80 for whoever's making the journey (or, if we meet somewhere in the middle, it costs us roughly £40 each). And we see each other once or twice a month - so, I think it works out about the same as one $600 round trip every 6 months. 

(With that being said... our recent Isle of Man trip cost us quite a lot more than that. I think the cost of the travel, the hotel, and the various things we were doing on the island came to about £1,000!)

[Dragon Lord]

My spending has only gone up over the years, especially after switching to a higher paying job. Especially since I keep buying new keyboard and mice that I don't need, but they look nice so I buy them. My spending on games has always been high, since I buy Limited Editions and Collector's Editions all of the time, so that hasn't really changed at all from before.

[ShiraNoMai]

Having adult things to pay for now instead of just having free money to use however has definitely made me shift spending habits. I definitely felt more conservative of my money back then versus now, despite having more money than back then, but that may be particularly why: I didn't know when I'd add to that finite amount of money I had, so I was definitely more pick-and-choose of what things I used it on. Now that I have a stable job, I can spend how I see fit and be fine with it.