N is generally weird that way. Last week, for instance, he needed a T-shirt, so he just went to Goodwill and bought one for $2. This is not a decision that would have occurred to me even when I was at my lowest point financially.
I asked him how he got to be this way and his answer was, “I was a graduate student for 5 years.”
He was a graduate student who worked for hedge funds every summer (before 2007), and he’s always had more money than I. Even when he was unemployed for 2 years and I was a college professor he had more money. And now we know how that came about.
Clarissa's Blog 
As someone once put it, the best way to live well is to live below your means.
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My excuse is that I’m living down the stereotype of the greedy Jews and even greedier Ukrainians. My profligacy has a social purpose. 🙂
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Some people just don’t like spending much on things they don’t find important. Why spend $15 on a generic t-shirt when you get get it for $2 and it’s the same quality? Plus if they’re old t-shirts, they’re probably better quality(the women’s t-shirts I see wear out very fast). When I see some of the frugality tips such as “reuse plastic bags and containers in to store food and line your trash cans” and “use less detergent” and “buy in bulk”, I laugh because I’ve always done this.
Anyways, greed is about using more things and resources and getting more money, not buying things at the lowest marked price.
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I always thought that Goodwill stores exist to help really poor people. So I thought uncomfortable going there and taking this stuff away from under their noses when I didn’t really desperately need it. I take things to Goodwill every year but never took anything out until today. And I do have some guilt over it which is weird.
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I get the impression that thrift stones receive more clothes donations than they can handle. Sometimes they even put out signs saying that they won’t accept any more clothes donations for a until they sell some of the current stock, so I wouldn’t feel guilty buying clothes from them.
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I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse then: The Afterlife of Cheap Clothes
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Wow, great article. Thank you!
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Three words: Church thrift stores. Amazing clothes at amazing prices.
I once bought a beautiful alpaca coat for two dollars. Okay it was in south florida where it was useless and the lining was ripped, but it was easy to fix the lining (the repair cost about twice what I paid for the coat itself) and I was living further north where it was very useful.
Also, all kinds of weird and wonderful books and other stuff could also be found at church thrift stores which used to be one of my favorite kinds of store (along with oriental grocery stores, I loved oriental grocery stores).
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“I once bought a beautiful alpaca coat for two dollars. Okay it was in south florida where it was useless and the lining was ripped, but it was easy to fix the lining (the repair cost about twice what I paid for the coat itself) and I was living further north where it was very useful.”
We have the best ever old books fairs at our local Catholic church. I always come out of there dragging enormous bundles of books. Last time I was there, the were selling these really old German Bibles that local families used back in the XIXth century. They were in Gothic scripts and had hand-written family trees on the first page. It’s like this incredible piece of local history.
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“And I do have some guilt over it which is weird”
It’s not only weird, it’s wrong and destructive. IME poor people don’t really shop at goodwill (which needs its middle class customers to survive).
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“IME poor people don’t really shop at goodwill”
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I try not to shop at Goodwill because they take advantage of a loophole in minimum wage laws to pay disabled workers pennies an hour, but I do love the Macy’s sales and clearance racks with a ridiculous passion.
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Oh, Macy’s!!!!!!!!! I’m planning to break my no-shopping-on-Boxing-day rule this year and go to Macy’s. I just can’t get over their tendency to have beautiful clothes in my size. And friendly sales people in my size who don’t try to tell me how amazing I will look in size 6 skirts. 🙂
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I know, it’s incredible! I got so many fashionable clothes at Macy’s at a fraction of what I’d pay at a Canadian outlet like Le Chateau, and without that not-appreciated “blood sausage” aesthetic a tall plus size woman usually gets when trying to fit into beautiful clothes. I fell in love with a new line they carry there called Maison Jules, I’m watching carefully to see if it goes on sale after Christmas.
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I used to be a fanatical lover of Le Chateau. All of my clothes as an undergrad came from there. And these were good-quality clothes. There is a dress from Le Chateau that I wore for 12 years! And it looked like new until almost the very end. But then they changed their style completely, and I don’t get the new one.
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I have a few older items from there that are still in top shape, but I can’t go into a Le Chateau now without cringing and wondering if the dresses would unravel the second or third time I wore them.
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“they take advantage of a loophole in minimum wage laws to pay disabled workers pennies an hour”
Everything I ever heard indicated that they didn’t employ disabled people (I knew one who couldn’t get hired there and, while they were a nice person, I could understand why…)”
The vital service goodwill and similar stores provide is letting middle class people throw out mass amounts of things belonging to a dead family member that no survivors want without feeling guilty about it, because…. charity….. disabled…… fairy magic!
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“The vital service goodwill and similar stores provide is letting middle class people throw out mass amounts of things belonging to a dead family member that no survivors want without feeling guilty about it, because…. charity….. disabled…… fairy magic!”
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Interesting that he common conception in Africa when encountering a lot of second hand goods is that it must have come from dead people. In fact it must have been taken off their bodies by an enemy, for a relative would surely appropriate the clothing as their own. I remember seeing a whole truck of second hand clothes going by shortly after independence and I said to my mother, “Are those from America? Did they come from dead Americans?”
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“Everything I ever heard indicated that they didn’t employ disabled people (I knew one who couldn’t get hired there and, while they were a nice person, I could understand why…)””
That’s curious, they generally go out of their way to promote themselves as being an employer of the disabled, including having enormous portraits of workers with Down’s Syndrome and Williams Syndrome on their local ads. Maybe they hushed that up after Forbes and a few other huge business publications joined the disability organizations in condemning the unequal paying practices.
But in light of Clarissa’s wish, a happier topic: I’m spending my holiday with my mother at the Andaz Hotel in Maui, which she got for free as a perk for being a long-term employee of the Hyatt. 🙂 I’m enjoying lots of alcohol-free drinks with coconut cream and reading fantasy novels inspired by The One Thousand And One Nights (it’s apparently its own genre).
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“I’m spending my holiday with my mother at the Andaz Hotel in Maui, which she got for free as a perk for being a long-term employee of the Hyatt. 🙂 I’m enjoying lots of alcohol-free drinks with coconut cream and reading fantasy novels inspired by The One Thousand And One Nights (it’s apparently its own genre).”
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