The Club PUBlication 02/19/2024

Loud budgeting’ makes it chic to be cheap
By MICHELLE SINGLETARY Washington Post

Young adults are giving up "living large" for "loud budgeting."
In this latest viral TikTok moment, folks aren't staying silent about being on a budget.

They're candid about needing to reduce debt or shore up emergency savings when passing on dining out, concert tickets or travel they cannot afford.

It's frugality with a social media bullhorn.

"I pay a lot of money to stay at home, so that's where I'll be," one person commented on TikTok.

Another says in her video: "It's about being transparent about your money and what fits and what doesn't ... not folding to peer pressure."
In 2024, it's chic to be cheap.

It's box-dyeing your hair, a drink or dinner but not both, and staycations. Loud budgeting is a guilt-free decline to a budget-busting social invite.

I love this money movement.  It's a new phase, but, really, it's the old practice of pennypinching, which centers on not being ashamed to say "no" to yourself or others who pressure you to spend.

I've never been ashamed to proclaim my frugality. I've shared over the years that I'm so cheap that I continued to wear my maternity underwear long after my children could walk and talk. Are you chuckling now or criticizing why I would admit such a thing? If it's the latter (which is what loud budgeting is all about), don't judge. Appreciate.

Maternity underwear is expensive, and I wasn't going to throw it out because I wasn't pregnant anymore. Besides, this type of lingerie provides great support. I frequently joke that I breastfed all three of my children because the milk was free.  
​That's loud budgeting!

No more feeling like you can't be honest not wanting to splurge on a weekend bridal or bachelor party in Las Vegas. It's pushing back when someone says, "Come on, it's not that much money," implying that you're being cheap when what you're doing is sticking to your financial priorities, such as saving for retirement.

Years ago, I had a "Penny Pincher of the Year" contest.  The first winner saved money by solar-cooking her food on her rooftop. All it took was a sunny day, water-resistant and aluminum-laminated cardboard, a clear plastic oven roasting bag to create a minigreenhouse effect, and a dark pot with a tightfitting lid for maximum heat absorption.

I was amused and amazed by the money-saving strategies described in the entries.

I'll never forget the letter from one woman about her grandmother's determination to make her own potholders from shoulder pads.
This penny-pinching strategy wasn't successful, though, because the homemade holders were prone to catching fire.

One past winner took a cutoff plastic 1-gallon milk jug into the shower. According to this frugal fellow, it took a few minutes for the hot water to reach his shower. So, he captured the potentially wasted cold water in the jug and filled the toilet tank.

If young adults want to repackage parsimony, that's great, because the struggle to save while managing monthly expenses is real.

Last year, credit card debt hit an all-time high of $1 trillion.
Inflation is still haunting consumers.

A Bankrate survey found only 44% of Americans had enough savings to handle a $1,000 emergency expense.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report that found auto and credit card debt began rising for low-income borrowers in 2022 through the third quarter of last year.

"While delinquency rates were unusually low during the pandemic, financial stress appears to have risen," the report's authors wrote.
The big expenses in people's budgets — housing and transportation — make saving difficult.

The average monthly payment on a new vehicle hit a record-high $739 in the last quarter of 2023, according to data from Edmunds, a carshopping website. It was $717 a year earlier.

The share of borrowers paying $1,000 or more a month swelled to 17.9%, also a record, during that period. That compares with 15.7% for the same three months of 2022.

Rents are extraordinarily high for many in the country.  In 2022, half of renter households — a record 22.4 million — spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, according to a just released report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Within this group, 12.1 million were in the precarious position of using more than half of their income to cover their rent. That figure was also an all-time high.

"Though rent growth has recently slowed substantially, the extended period of rising rents during the pandemic propelled cost burdens to new heights," according to the report.

Encouraging yourself to be honest about your budget constraints can be liberating. It's also the answer to FOMO, or the fear of missing out.

I can get behind a trend that preaches penny-pinching without awkwardness or embarrassment.

Embrace loud budgeting, because it's OK to boldly own your financial truth.

In 2024, it's chic to be cheap. It's box-dyeing your hair, a drink or dinner but not both, and staycations.