Meredith's post at Like Merchant Ships, about what happened when she fell off the cash bandwagon, got me thinking about our use of cash and the emotional power that cash has to influence our spending.
Our family has been using the cash in envelopes system for well over a decade now. In fact, it's so automatic that I feel vulnerable shopping with my debit card. I feel like I'm driving around a sharp curve in the mountains and there is no guardrail to protect me. With cash in hand, I always know where I stand. So, my grocery and miscellaneous budgets are always in cash, in my wallet.
When I started couponing, something crazy happened. We would get to a new budget period, and I would still have cash left in my wallet. I started pulling that cash out and stashing it away in an envelope. Although I hadn't told my husband how much money I was stashing away, I often shared my successes on individual shopping trips.
He's a great guy and he humored me. We love to play a guessing game as a family, where I lay out all my booty and the family tries to guess how much I paid (Price is Right rules-no going over). He was always a willing participant. Ever the supportive husband, he never complained and let me do my thing.
But there is a big difference between the power of one frugal person in a marriage, and two people working together in tandem to save big. I would have called him supportive, but not proactive. Until...
Just after I started couponing, we had two family weddings pop up back-to-back. One involved a 6 hour car trip. The other involved an 11 hour car trip and 3 nights in a hotel. Of course, both required a gift. All this in the heat of declining commissions, rising food and utility costs, and $4 a gallon gas. Needless to say, we were feeling stretched.
I told my husband that I thought I could save up enough money to pay for gas for one of the trips by stashing the leftover grocery money. He thought that would be great and left me to do my thing. When we left for the second trip, I pulled out $200 cash from the envelope, vaguely aware that there was some more money in there, and away we went. He was thrilled that the gas was covered.
When we got home, I stashed the leftover money we had budgeted for the trip. We had avoided restaurants, and I had taken food from my couponstash to eat when possible. I had even managed to put together a gift basket, made from my drugstore cache, to use for one of the gifts. Hmm...my envelope was getting fat. I needed to clean it out.
Imagine my husband's surprise (and mine), when I pulled $800 out of that envelope and handed it to him to put in savings! Have you seen $800 cash lately? If you don't think there is much emotional power in cash, maybe it's because you haven't seen $800 cash recently. We were both blown away.
Not long after that, we were revising the family budget, and I mentioned that I thought we could sharply reduce two budget categories because of couponing. "No way," said my husband, "I rely on you to save and stash that money."
Now, my husband is couponings biggest advocate. He'll tell anyone who will listen about the success I've had. He's happy to make a run to the store using coupons or to eat some strange new foodstuff I got free. Last week, we even went on a grocery shopping date at Publix, so that we could each get a penny item. He views money spent on groceries in a new way, because he sees the power of a dollar.
In fact, several weeks ago he had a Cub Scout gathering at our home. He told me he was going to stop by the store and pick up some snacks for the boys. When I got home that night, there was soda, but no snacks. "What happened to the snacks?" I asked. When he saw the price of chips, he couldn't bring himself to spend that much money. He made popcorn instead.
If you thought we were making tracks on the food budget before, watch us go now. We're a dynamic duo. The moral of the story is: If you want to win your husband over to your new frugal ways, try flashing a little cash.