Budgeting by carrying only cash — An experiment in self-controlled spending

For the first time in about twenty years, I went on vacation with just cash in my pocket: $500 for 5 fun-filled days in New Orleans over the Thanksgiving holiday. I picked the amount of $100 per day arbitrarily out of a hat. I had no idea if it would be enough for both my husband and myself, and if not, if I’d be able to resist the urge to pull out the “plastic.” We had a free place to stay at my Cousin Carla’s house, so we only needed to cover meals, entertainment, and souvenirs.

I haven’t lived on a cash budget since college in the late 1980s, when I took $20 out of the ATM every week and spent it until it was gone. My boyfriend at the time took up the slack, treating us to dinner out at restaurants with his weekly allowance of $40 from his parents (I had to work for mine).

In those days, neither of us had a credit card and couldn’t have gotten one even if we wanted. Credit cards weren’t given out nearly as readily as they are now, which was a good thing. I didn’t qualify for a major card until I was out of college, working full time, and only after building my credit score by successfully managing an account from a major department store (JCPenney) for a little over a year.

The cash method is a tried and true method of budgeting, still practiced by those who don’t trust putting their money in a bank. I’ve known many a man who turns his paycheck into cash every Friday, then pays any bills that are due before blowing the rest by having fun going out over the weekend. By Monday, he’s nearly broke and living off a tuna fish, frozen vegetable and macaroni and cheese casserole until the next paycheck arrives.

My husband and I loosely follow the cash method of budgeting with our weekly lunch allowances. However, this was the first time either of us had tried to follow a budget on vacation, a time when I tend to live high on the hog, then pay the price when I return home after racking up hundreds of dollars on my credit card.

To make the budget work, we didn’t include filling up the car with gas. First, there was no telling how much gas would be since prices yo-yo up and down like a bungee jumper from day-to-day and vary from station-to-station, as well as from city-to-city and state-to-state due to locally imposed taxes. Second, we had to have gas, so running out of money to pay for it was not an option.

The first road block to staying on budget occurred on the way to Louisiana. My car overheated in Tallahassee and my husband and I and the nice man at the Costco gas station couldn’t find any busted hoses, mostly because it was raining buckets and water was everywhere. Everyone we surveyed expected that the thermostat had gone bad, a cheap fix. I had to get a tow, but expected it to be free through my new AAA membership. It wasn’t — only the first five miles were free and the rest were charged at $5 per mile.

Cha-ching! Tow at $20.

I have a reasonably new car, still under partial warranty, and only felt comfortable getting work done by a licensed dealer. The repair shop found the problem right away – critters eating the hoses, probably squirrels – no kidding! Although many gnawed hoses could wait, the one to my radiator had to be replaced. (I got to keep the old hose with the gnaw marks for proof — knowing no one would believe me.)

Cha-ching! Dealer repair at $267

Unfortunately, the repair shop didn’t keep parts in stock and had to order them. It would take a day to repair, so we had to stay overnight at a hotel where the dealer got us a discounted room.

Cha-ching! Hotel room at $44.

Including meals, we had now spent $378 of our $500 budget and we hadn’t even made it to New Orleans, yet. Bah humbug! We had no choice but to break the budget and go to the ATM for more cash, a small portion of which we would use to pay for meals on the trip back home. This left us roughly $65 per day for two fun-filled days in New Orleans.

The details of how we spent the money will completely bore you. However, the attitudes of the people around us who we informed of our “daily budget” were both surprising and unexpected.

My cousin Carla watched with amusement our regular habit of pulling out our cash to see how much we had left. It didn’t sink in that we were serious about following our budget until we were nearly out of money that first night. “I would just use plastic,” she kept saying.

“Normally we would. But, that’s what gets us into trouble,” I explained. “I just paid off the credit card with my non-FDIC insured money market, since I had to close it out anyway.” Although there was nothing to stop us from racking up the credit card again, we decided we’d rather save the “plastic” for emergencies.

My cousin’s boyfriend, Ricky, was disturbed by my husband’s public display of cash. “You’ll get robbed. I know this town,” he warned. “Promise me, you’ll never do it again.”

“Okay, I won’t,” my husband promised and agreed to count his money inside his wallet, under the table. He wasn’t used to paying with cash and is very trusting.

“I’ll pay for it. Don’t worry about it,” said Ricky.

“Save it. You’ll need money tomorrow,” said my cousin Carla.

However, our goal was to spend all our money by the end of the night. The next day, we would start fresh with our next day’s budget. I didn’t want to be a leech, but agreed to let my cousin’s boyfriend pay for dinner because he really wanted to impress us and treat us to something nice. We would make up for it by buying their drinks the rest of the night until the money ran out.

The next day, when my cousin called her boyfriend to discuss the plans for that night, we heard her sigh and say, “They’re doing the money thing again.”

The money thing? Since when is budgeting with cash considered unusual and odd?

That afternoon, we met up with one of my husband’s friends from work with his wife, also in New Orleans for the holidays. We treated for brunch at the Café du Monde, which sells an affordable small cup of coffee for $2 and a decadent pastry called a beignet. The total cost for the five of us, plus a souvenir mug, was only $25. We mentioned to Carla that we had $40 left of that day’s budget, enough to pay for her parking and for the three of us to eat dinner at a sandwich shop we’d passed the day before.

What we didn’t anticipate was that my husband’s friends, who overheard us, assumed that we are hard up for cash. “We aren’t,” my husband tried to explain. “We’re just on a budget.”

At work the next week, the friend insisted on buying lunch for my husband, still under the impression that because we are limiting our spending, we must be in financial trouble. The friend is in his mid 20s and has carried a credit card since his teens. The concept of voluntarily limiting spending has never occurred to him and his young wife, who buy nearly everything on credit.

Although our budget did cause some awkward moments, we’re laughing all the way to the bank. I just balanced my checkbook and we actually saved a small amount of money last month despite going on vacation (a challenge after grocery prices and utilities went up this summer).

I only wish I’d used the same method of paying in cash to buy Christmas presents — I’m already over budget!

Sears Sales Down? I Blame the Bad Lighting

Enter some Sears stores today, and it feels as if you’re walking into a cave. The lighting is dark and gray and makes the store feel depressing, old, out-of-date, and filthy.

The last Sears I visited in Florida was at the Volusia Mall in Daytona Beach, Florida last June. The mall itself  was built in 1974 according to Wikipedia, but was renovated as recently as 2006. The common spaces and food court are appealing.

At left: Dark utility lighting, gray walls and ceilings, and flat-finish floors shown in a Northridge, Los Angeles, CA Sears store. (AP photo by Stefano Paltera, 2006.) At right: Macy’s sports a brighter ceiling, warmer cream-toned walls, and a shinier floor in a Columbus, Ohio store . (AP photo by Kiichiro Sato, 2007).

Some of the stores, especially the Volusia Mall Macy’s with its cream colored walls and good lighting, appear pleasantly sunny, despite being indoors. The environment is the perfect backdrop for their colorful, shiny, sparkly merchandise and I rarely find myself leaving the store without at least one purchase – a new blouse, a purse, or a lovely pair of earrings. However, walk into the Sears at the other end of the mall and you feel as if you’ve suddenly entered the discount shopping center.

I imagine that Sears is trying to cut costs and be politically correct by installing low-cost energy efficient fluorescent lighting. However, the particular bulbs they have chosen seem better suited for a warehouse, parking garage, basement, or storeroom than for a retail store. Products, which should appear new, fresh, shiny, bright, and colorful look old and pre-worn. The store looks more like a dollar store than a large and important retail outlet. The floor in many Sears stores is even dirty, perhaps because the workers can’t see the dirt or because the strobing fluorescent lights give them a headache. I assume that this particular Sears store has not been renovated in sometime, but perhaps the bad lighting is fooling my perception of it.

Despite falling sales, Sears occupies the largest contiguous retail space at the Volusia Mall at 192,096 square feet, and is one of the original anchor tenants. The Sears space is larger than the more successful Macy’s at 157,530 sq. ft and JC Penney at 145,668 square feet. Dilliards occupies a larger total space when you add their three disconnected store spaces at 323,249 square feet, but each store space is still smaller than Sears. (Facts on square footage from Wikipedia).

Lighting and color can play a very large role in effecting the moods of shoppers. The study of ergonomics, man’s relationship to his environment, has shown in countless studies that a correctly lit space greatly effects the mood and production of workers. Why not shoppers, too?

In 2006, a study was published called, “The impact of light and colour on psychological mood: A cross-cultural study of indoor work environments.” Summaries of the study can be found at Informe Design, and at Cat.Insist. In the study, five scientists, Rikard Kuller, Seifeddin G. Ballal, Thorbjorn Laike, Byron Mikellides, and Graciela Tonello, found that color and good lighting improve workers’ moods. 988 workers completed the study. Mood was at its lowest when lighting was perceived as too dark and at its highest when the lighting was perceived as just right. Moods were slightly lower when spaces were perceived as too bright.

A previous study from 2002 “The importance of light for health and well-being in outdoor and indoor environments,” by the same team of scientists showed that dark environments made workers feel tired and depressed.

A study by Laike and Kuller in 1998, titled, “The impact of flicker from fluorescent lighting on well-being, performance and physiological arousal. Ergonomics,” found that the flickering from fluorescent lighting actually causes certain individuals to speed up their work, but not do their work as well and make more mistakes. The flickering actually caused measurable nervous stress in the workers when their brain waves were analyzed. When electronic high-frequency ballasts of good quality were used, the flickering of the lights decreased.

So in other words, the cheap fluorescent lighting in Sears retail stores is causing shoppers to feel stressed and want to hurry out of the store. The dark lighting makes shoppers feel depressed and tired. This doesn’t sound like a very good recipe for retail success.

I love to shop at Sears because they carry an excellent collection of my favorite sports shoes: Reeboks; have a wonderful return and warranty policy; and carry some of the best quality brand tools and appliances (Craftsman and Kenmore). They also sell very nice clothing and housewares, if you can stand being inside the store long enough to look at them.

All Sears are not so dysfunctional. I recently visited the Sears in the Ala Moana Center mall in Honolulu, Hawaii. My family and I spent two valuable hours shopping in the store and left with over $300 in new shoes, clothing, and beautiful Hawaiian shirts.

I hope that Sears re-evaluates their lighting choices. A penny saved is not always a penny earned, especially when it comes to putting customers into a buying mood.