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Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Pennies & Popcorn! If you haven’t checked out our About Us or About The Show pages, pop on over to find out who we are and what the show is about!
As we write this, it is the holiday season. Christmas is right around the corner, which means our stuffed hippopotamus named Gayla has made her annual appearance and is hanging out on our fireplace. (What – doesn’t everybody want a hippopotamus for Christmas??) And the cold weather means we’re spending many of our chilly Colorado evenings wrapped up under warm toasty blankets and slaving away in front of the TV picking out new content JUST for you guys. Otherwise, y’know, we’d never watch TV.
ANYway, for our very first episode, we’re covering two skits from Saturday Night Live that are so good it’s almost like Santa picked them out as gifts just for us! We’re covering Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford, and SNL’s spectacular spoof of the Lexus December to Remember car commercials. And because we love you guys SO much and know you can’t get enough of us, we’re putting our blog posts in addition to the dulcet tones of our voices coming into your ears in our weekly podcast. Haaaapy holidays!
One of the skits we covered in this week’s pod is called …
Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford
In this skit, we see Amy Poehler and Steve Martin playing a couple struggling with their finances, when Chris Parnell comes in and offers them this incredibly sage advice: Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford!
So I guess all the kajillions of people out there who try to help people get their finances in check can just call it quits. Including us! Because the advice allll boils down to these six little words: Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford. That’s a wrap, folks!
Man, why isn’t it that simple? Why can’t we all just walk around going: “Nope, I can’t comfortably afford that so I definitely won’t buy it or dream about it and make myself miserable wishing I could. Gosh darn it, I’m smart and emotionally stable.” It would be a nice world if we could all do that. But as any human on planet earth knows, we crave stuff. We want stuff. We like stuff. Stuff is fun and new and exciting and shiny and it makes us feel important! We just CAN’T get enough of it.
The Siren Call of Stuff and How We Justify It
At no time is our stuff-addiction clearer than the holidays (we’re looking at you Lexus, with your eeeevil December to Remember campaign). But it’s not something that goes away in January. The siren call of stuff is there all the time – your friend is toting a new bag that looks snazzier and has more conveniently located pockets than yours. Your co-worker bought a new car and it’s making your older model look a little drab now. Wouldn’t that new safety feature they have be totally worth it? Wouldn’t it make buying a whole new car the responsible thing to do actually? I mean, doesn’t everyone without lane-keep assistance eventually die in a terrible car crash that this one feature could have avoided? Yeah, that feels right. I’m pretty sure they did a study proving that. Yep – let’s head to the dealership TODAY and spend thirty or forty thousand to make sure we’re safe. It’s got nothing to do with features and flash and fanciness. It’s safety-related.
We find an awful lot of ways to justify spending that just never, ever needs to happen. We had a tough day and we deserve it. We really need it! These new tennis shoes will be the thing that really motivates me to get in shape finally! We have family coming over and they’ll be judgy if we don’t upgrade that couch that’s getting a little lumpy. We can’t possibly wear the same sweater to two parties. We all do it. Hell, we have a stuffed hippopotamus on our fireplace right now, which is not exactly what one would call a need.
Fun Stuff is … Fun! But Not as Much Fun as Peace of Mind
And buying stuff we don’t truly need can be awesome! I love lil ol’ Gayla and she makes me happy every time I look at her big beautiful eyes. But Gayla and everything else in life that isn’t a true need (staying warm, eating nutritious food, clean water, and … arguably, Gayla), is something we should acknowledge for what it is: fun. NOT necessary. And something fun and unnecessary is not worth going into debt for. If you’re one of the unfortunate hordes of people who have been forced into debt in order to afford life-saving medical care, or to be able to put food on the table, you have my deepest sympathy and this post is not aimed at you. But even larger hordes of people have been lucky to enough to avoid those kinds of tragedies but went into debt to buy clothes, shoes, furniture, jet skis, jewelry, and Jaguars. (We like alliteration around here.) Every last one of these things is far less valuable than the peace of mind that comes with being debt free.
Why Debt is Saying Screw You to … Yourself
I mean, think about what debt really is. It’s basically a big “screw you” to your future self. You’re saying, I want this thing but I can’t pay for it. So I’ll do what Steve Martin suggests in the skit and buy it now, hoping I’ll come up with the money later! So now your future self is saddled with buying not only the things that your future self needs and wants, but with all the things that its past self wanted, too. Future self might not even have those things anymore. Future self might not even use or want those things anymore. But by god, they still have to pay for it.
How grouchy would you be if some guy walked up to you on the street and said:
Hey, I just bought this $200 pair of headphones (even though I already had a workable pair at home), because the bass on these is dope and I really wanted them. But I don’t have the cash. So uh … you pay these off for me over the next year, ok? The interest rate will be about 18%!
Not sure about you guys, but I’d be ANGRY at that dude. Why didn’t he just wait until he had the money instead of depending on me to figure it out for him? And that’s how you treat your future self when you go into debt. You are THAT GUY – to yourself. Don’t do it, man. Be nice to you or nobody else will.
Until next time, we hope you enjoy the holiday season and don’t let it lure you into buying stuff you cannot afford!