As I’m writing my posts and thinking of posts I would like to do in the future I have come across an issue that I feel I must address immediately. I feel like I am seeming to be a bit of a hypocrite. Here I am telling people to spend less money, be more self sufficient, and yet both C and I have our own businesses where we expect people to pay top dollar for leather working or cosmetics. So let me explain….
We save money where we feel it is necessary in order to spend money where it is important. quality of goods should never be overlooked. We don’t buy stuff to buy stuff. Every dollar we spend is a conscious effort to make a difference. Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t perfect, we buy from walmart when we have to, we eat at mcdonalds, we buy cheap when we need it right away and upgrade when we have the money. There is nothing wrong with that.
My point is that if we had the money, and when we have the money, we buy quality products, preferably locally or American made, from local people. We buy real Christmas trees every year because the real tree industry provides 10,000 jobs to Americans. We buy the $4.50 organic lemon juice instead of the other stuff that is full of chemicals. It’s more expensive to do these things but to me it’s worth it. We spend $7 on good artisan cheese instead of buying american cheese, and when we cant afford it we get the cheap cheddar because it’s still free of preservatives and much cheaper than the fancy cheese. We don’t buy tons of toys for the kids. we buy maybe 1 or 2 things every year interspersed with little $1 toys we expect they will play with for a day and forget about. I’m not going to spend money on clothes that are going to fall apart. I would much rather have a weeks worth of quality pieces that will last years than a month’s worth of clothes that aren’t going to last more than a few months. (actually I am blessed with the ability to sew, so a good deal of my clothes are handmade, and they last forever), but you get my point.
We only sell things that we would buy ourselves. In fact, for both of us started our businesses because we wanted the products we sell but couldn’t afford them ourselves, now we can.
