Gails Blog

In my humble (yah!) opinion, The I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin is, perhaps, the hardest to combat. Having slaved away in the mines all day, we feel entitled to a pint with the boys, that new pair of shoes, or dinner out. We need a glass of wine to relax. We need a vacation. We need a new car.

Nothing brings this home faster than when I see people lined up to exchange their money for the latest techno-gadget. I can’t believe that people are so rabid to spend their money that they’ll get in a loooooong line, get rained or snowed on, sleep on the sidewalk just the be able to say they had it first. (Really? First?

Many of the couples I work with demonstrate that they’re walking around with the I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin in tow. They’re willing to exchange their future incomes (yeah, that’s what credit is, people) for STUFF they deserve to have. I’ve had people tell me, “We work really hard, we deserve a vacation.” I’ve had people tell me, “I have a great job, I deserve to drive a nice car.” And I’ve had people tell me, “I do twelve-hour shifts, I deserve dinner out.”

Hey, for all the people who want to drop $700 on the latest cell phone who HAVE THE MONEY IN THE BANK, I don’t have a thing to say to you. It’s your money; spend it any way you wish. But for the dopes who are planning to put that new phone on credit and then carry the balance around for a few years at some ridiculous interest rate (any interest rate), give your head a shake.

The thing about the I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin is that it can trick you into pledging many years of future income for the pleasures you’re seeking today. It doesn’t care how much interest you’re going to have to pay, how much more expensive that Have-to-Have-It item will be when you tack on the interest, or how long it’ll take you to get out of debt. And it doesn’t care that what else may end up losing if your circumstances change and you find you can’t pay for that holiday you deserved.

Advertisers know that people love to take a stroll down Luxury Lane with the I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin. They put it in their clients’ slogans, sing it to you, show you people just like you who are buying what you will come to feel you, too, deserve.

Nowhere has the I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin done more damage than in the arena of home-ownership. We have come to believe we deserve to own our own homes. Never mind that we haven’t had the commitment, the discipline, or the foresight to save a downpayment. Lenders have played into this delusion by offering borrowers far more credit than they should have access to. So there are people who have bought homes they can barely afford. Sadly, when the time comes to renew the mortgage, even a small upward movement in interest rates will make payments unmanageable.

The current foreclosure mess in the U.S. is the fallout of hanging out with the I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin.  Re-framed as a “right”, the American dream of homeownership was assumed by too many people who never considered the true costs and sacrifices required to make the dream a reality. And so now the dreams have been shattered and families are finding themselves out in the cold, literally.

I see a lot of people struggling to repay debt for things they felt they deserved. In 2006, almost 100,000 Canadians had to file a creditor proposal or declare bankruptcy because they lost the struggle. In the U.S., 618,000 people filed for bankruptcy. I’m willing to bet dogs to donuts none of those people felt they deserved it.

BTW: No blog tomorrow. We’re taking the kids to Stratford for some Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet. Back Monday. Have a great weekend. 

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He who dies with the most toys wins. This sentiment is usually attributed to men. I’m not sure why, but it applies to anybody who has been listening to the Having-More-Means-A-Better-Life Gremlin.

In our very consumer-focused, advertisement driven, marketing molded world, “better” has come to mean “more”. People think that their lives will be better if they can just figure out how to have more – more big screen TVs, more shoes, more money.

Ya know what, based on my experience, more STUFF doesn’t make us more HAPPY. Nope. In fact, I’ve seen an inverse relationship. It seems the more UNHAPPY we are, the more STUFF we need, as if it is a balm to soothe our sense of what’s missing.

If more made us happy, then lottery winners, people who inherited, and people with the highest income would be the happiest in our land. Not so. Studies have shown that those who suddenly come into “more” are often worse off five years later.

According to a study by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, “The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory.

So why this obsession with accumulating STUFF? Why the drive to have the latest phone, the newest in fashion, the shiniest car? It may simply be that we’ve stopped measuring the richness of our lives by the things we take for granted, that other people would die for. Things like clean air, an abundance of water, healthy food, good health, the availability of education, meaningful work, and freedom of religion and speech, to name just the most obvious.

When Barbara Walters interviewed billionaire David Geffen and asked, ‘O.K., David, now that you’re a billionaire, are you happy?’ his response was ‘Barbara, anybody who believes money makes you happy doesn’t have money.’

Bill McKibben’s recent book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Community and a Durable Future explores the idea that the foundation of our economic assumptions must be re-evaluated and re-tooled. While our civilization has conditioned us to believe that more is better, it ain’t so. However, many of us are willing to go deeper into debt every day to prove how well we’re doing.

We have substituted consumerism for what people really want: love and community, a sense of belonging, worthwhile effort, happiness. The work of overcoming our rampant consumer addiction can only be done inside ourselves. Nobody else can fix this for us. We need, individually, to fix it for ourselves.

How?

Move from being Impulsive to Thoughtful. Stop choosing short term gratification over our long-term benefits. Saving for retirement might be boring, but it’s going to be really important when you finally do stop working and are looking for a way to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly.

Stop Rationalizing. You can always find a “good reason” to scratch your acquisition itch. We are the masters of rationalization. We’re saving so much on an item, we just have to buy it. People take this to the extreme buying things they don’t need, don’t want, and can’t use, just because they’re focusing on how much they are saving. (Hey, if you’re spending you’re not saving.) Or we decide that buying “quality” is worth going into debt. Really? Or we focus on some extraneous issue: since I am fat, I need to spend more money on clothes so people won’t think I’m ashamed of my body. Hmmm. We apply this rationalization to why we need to buy a certain car, acquire a bigger house, or  wear brand names. It isn’t about meeting needs. It’s about the Having-More-Means-A-Better-Life Gremlin weaving its magic spell.

Undo Your Illusions. People confuse the medium for happiness with the actual results, the most famous example being money. Even though money itself doesn’t make people happier, we continue to work harder to get more money. More is better. But it isn’t. Sometimes more is just more.

Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman study found a weaker-than-expected correlation between income and happiness. Looking at a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on how people with various levels of income spend their time, they discovered that women who make over $100,000 a year spend 19.6% of their time having fun, while those who make less than $20,000, spend 33.5% of their time kicking back or socializing.

The Having-More-Means-A-Better-Life Gremlin is misleading us to work for more money even when happier pursuits would ultimately do us more good.

How are you going to conquer the Having-More-Means-A-Better-Life Gremlin? Books, websites, gurus on “simplification” abound, and the message is trickling down slowly. Very slowly. And perhaps now that we’re having to spend significantly more of our income on NEEDS — fuel for our cars, fuel for our bodies — we’ll move back to focusing on what’s really important, and not on the STUFF. 

Tomorrow’s Gremlin: The I-Work-Hard-So-I-Deserve-It Gremlin

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I’ve just finished working with a couple that I LOVED! Sweet, enthusiastic, bent. So much room for improvement. The first thing I noticed when I Dropped My Bag And Had A Quick Look Around was that there wasn’t a corner of the house that didn’t have a doodad of some sort in it. I asked if this was part of her culture – if she was recreating the home she’d grown up in. Noooo. That wasn’t it. She was just a Stuff Gatherer. I pointed out that there wasn’t a corner of the house that didn’t have a little table with stuff on it, candles, or some other doohickey. She didn’t see what I saw.

Later I went into the main floor bathroom and, as I was having a pee, I noticed that in front of me, in the corner, was a set of candles – tall – just standing there in a threesome. How strange, I thought. When I glanced under the sink, there in the corner was a picture, leaning up against the wall, UNDER THE SINK. I brought my Tchotchke Queen into the bathroom. She gasped. She’d never noticed that she was filling her corners with STUFF.

Three gremlins were at work in this house. And I’m sure they inhabit many homes, so I’m sending you around your house to look for them and evict them. I’m going to deal with them one at a time so you have some time to come to terms with these gremlins if they are at work in your psyche.

First up, the I’m-the-Shopper Gremlin, which was always whispering in Lucy’s ear. Since she was responsible for keeping her house beautiful, keeping her children beautiful, keeping her husband beautiful, she was always shopping. She loved a good bargain and made a habit of hitting the Everything-60%-Off-Everyday Store every chance she got, which was usually EVERY DAY during lunch hour since there was a store right across the street from work. And she hardly ever went in without buying something. New hand towels, a shirt for her husband, clothes for her kids, a beautiful set of glasses, another picture, yet one more candle… Her family had made her responsible for the acquisition of what they needed and she was taking her role as BUYER very seriously.

Problem is, the I’m-the-Shopper Gremlin has no clue about the difference between a NEED and a WANT. It just wants to SHOP. And so, with this gremlin whispering soothing messages of love, caring and responsibility in her ear Lucy shopped.

The first thing I needed to do was bring her to her senses on what was a NEED versus what was a WANT. With some help, she had to go through rooms of her home and take out the “wants”, piling them up for me to see. More importantly, she was piling them up so she could see the crap she’d gone into debt for. What a success! Worked like a sledgehammer. So there was Lucy, surrounded by her stuff, wondering how the hell she could have been so unconscious in her shopping.

Lucy isn’t alone. There are loads of people who do this. But Lucy got the message. As I was showing off my new, snappy shoes (pink, green and yellow high-heeled sandals which I picked up for $16), she quipped, “Were they a need or a want, Gail.” Ha!

So how do you get a handle on the I’m-the-Shopper Gremlin?

Some people decide they will only shop one day of the week. You’ve seen me encourage fams to do this, since it takes away the temptation of the Impulse Buy.

Some people decide to shop with a list and only buy what’s on the list. If they see something they want, they add it to their next list.

Some people declare a moratorium on shopping, deciding to participate in Shop-Free days two or three or four days of the week. So they can’t buy ANYTHING on Shop-Free Saturday, for example.

Then there are the folks who challenge themselves to see how long they can go without buying anything. (Usually gas and food are the exceptions since they are virtually always NEEDS.) If they do shop, they have to start their counting again, and they’re always trying to beat their last best No Shopping Streak.

If you’ve got this gremlin running rampant through your life, what’s your plan to cope? Without a plan,  the I’m-the-Shopper Gremlin will not only end up costing you a lot of money, it’ll also end up making you spend way more time than you should have to DUSTING! ? Boo, hiss to the  I’m-the-Shopper Gremlin.

Up next, the Having-More-Means-A-Better-Life Gremlin.