Finances: Clothing

I just looked at our budget.  We are on track to spend less than $1500 this year on clothing.  For a family of 10.

I'm guessing that some people think that is high, and many people think that is low.

I don't remember a lot of things that happened 25 years ago but I do remember the following incident.

I was at Michigan Technological University at a Women in Engineering summer camp.  A female engineer sat down with us one day to talk about "budgets and money."  She showed us a budget, and her clothing budget was about $200/month.  For her, alone.  In 1986.

One of the girls with me said, "ONLY $200/month??"  The lady smiled and said, "Well, this is just after you have your wardrobe largely established."

I was shocked.  My parents were middle class but didn't have a lot of extra money, and NO WAY did we spend $200/month/person on clothing.  When I heard that conversation, I wondered if I too would spend lots of money on clothing as the years went by.

The answer is, obviously, NO. 

Truth is, I REALLY dislike clothes shopping. It is really almost peculiar how much I hate buying clothes! 

There are probably several factors.

1.  I like being comfortable way more than I like being fashionable.

2.  I lived in the jungles of South America for 3 years as a child, where moth and rust destroyed though no thieves broke in and stole.  (That's a paraprase of a Bible verse in the gospels somewhere :-).)  Actually, mildew and mud attacked our clothing more often than moths.  Why was that important?  Well, I learned that getting attached to clothing tended to be a disappointing experience.  I would occasionally get excited about some clothes only to have them develop holes or grow mildew.

3. I had hypoglycemic episodes while shopping.  That sounds weird.  My paternal grandmother loved me dearly and we spent quite a bit of time together considering we never lived within 100 miles of one another (once I was older than 6 or 7, anyway.)  She was a young adult during the Great Depression and was very frugal.  When we went shopping for clothes, she headed straight for the sales racks.  She was SO careful.  Due to her generosity, my parents didn't have to buy many clothes for me during my teen years because my grandmother bought me so many quality, low cost items. 

Now all that sounds good and it was.  However, there was one semi-comical aspect to our shopping trips.  My grandmother and I (and my aunt, who also has excellent taste in clothes and an eye for bargains) would eat a hearty breakfast and go off shopping.  By hearty, I mean we'd have toast and cereal and the like.  About 11 a.m., I would start feeling "hungry".  It wasn'really hunger, it was hypoglycemia.  I had those episodes throughout my teen and young adult years frequently.  I would start feeling incredibly shaky and just AWFUL.  I felt like I was going to fall down in a faint.  I felt like I could eat the entire Earth and have the Moon for dessert.  At the time, I believed that was what "hunger" felt like.

In my mid 30's, I was diagnosed with diabetes.  I started measuring my blood sugar and realized that when I felt that awful shaky feeling, I was dropping low with my blood sugar.  So it wasn't hunger, which I could have handled, it was hypoglycemia.

The long and the short of it is that while I enjoyed some aspects of our shopping trips, my most vivid memory was getting faint from hypoglycemia.  My grandmother and aunt had no intention of starving me of course, and we always had a nice lunch at some point, but it was often later than noon and those couple hours when I felt bad are branded in my memory. It is sad that none of us knew what was going on, as I could have carried some nuts or other high protein snacks in my purse and avoided the whole thing.

I guess this is Finances:  Clothing, Part 1.  I'll write a Part 2 one of these days talking about how we keep our clothing budget down.