I Certainly Hope They Make a Patch, Gum, or Inhaler for This

A friend told me recently that her sister decided last New Year's to not buy herself anything other than necessities for the duration of 2006. I snorted. Inconceivable. No clothes? No CDs? No DVDs? No doodads for the house? No baubles for the wrist? No fresh flowers? "I wouldn't last two days on that kind of a venture," I thought before clicking "confirm order now," on a pair of new ski pants. But as the days have passed since she mentioned it, I haven't been able to shake the idea. Could I do without for a year, just to see if I could do it?

Last night I decided to parse all of my checking account statements from 2006. An informal audit of my spending as it were. I didn't pay attention to any purchases for bills, groceries, drugstore trips, travel, or spending that I knew was on gifts for others. I was just tallying the Banana Republic stops, the Garden District visits, the Cafe Deluxe noshes and the like. The results were horrifying:

More than $12,000 in one year on non-essentials. And that's just based on identifiable purchases; it doesn't even include cash that I might have used after making an ATM withdrawal. Now, I'm less concerned with the second column. Really I just tabulated that to see what it would come to. Dining out is both necessary (a girl's got to eat) and social. Heck, nearly one-twelfth of that particular bill came from one night at The Caucus Room when I took my Significant Other out to celebrate him landing his job after moving to D.C.

It's that first column--we'll call it the Needless Budget-Clusterflubbing Fluff Column--that has me questioning my sanity. At first, reading back through the bank statements was like a pleasant skip down Memory Lane. The pink, ribbed sweater that made my skin glow here. The new toile comforter for the guest room there. But then I hit months like April, where a $550 trip to the mercilessly enticing Sitting Pretty boutique in Annapolis helped push the spending tally into four digits and I started to feel guilty. By the time I gasped and sputtered into the December bank statement, a year's worth of buyer's remorse had taken up residence in the pit of my stomach.

So that's it. I'm holding my nose and taking the plunge. I'm seeing how long I can last without buying anything for myself that isn't essential.

*Now if someone would be a lamb and send me a burned copy of The Crane Wife, that would be swell because I'd planned on buying it and I'd hate to welch already.