Since I chose to stay in China when the pandemic first began, for a period of 8-months, 90% of my social circle was gone. Flight cancellations and changing re-entry rules for foreigners meant when we broke up for holidays in January 2020, it wouldn’t be until October 2020 that many of them came back to campus.
I am a person who prefers doing things with other people. Left to my own devices, my choices of entertainment are self-contained and cost very little: drawing, photography, sleeping, taking walks, etc. etc. As a result, I now have months worth of data during which I involuntarily reduced my friend-related expenses, and I have a bunch of other months where I didn’t.
Being a recluse for 8 months is bad news for my mental health but good news for blog content y’all.
Summary
Yup, I sure do hate doing things on my own.
Average without friends: $616
Average with friends: $1098 (a 78% increase)
You can read the details below. In general, outside of leisure, other categories which are high are more due to a few expensive items rather than an uptick in consumerism. For example, a ski outfit that cost $600 in one go instead of buying new shoes every month.
Am I happy to double my spendings with my friends? Fucking absolutely. I would even happily triple it.
I must give a huge caveat that my work pays for my housing so just mentally adjust these numbers with whatever your cost of rent is.
Details by category
Food-related expenses
Same amount just in different places. Controversial opinion but eating by yourself at a restaurant is not that fun.
Leisure
We are all shocked, I’m sure. To me, something is worth doing only if I can share the memory with people I care about, I am definitely not a person to explore or do activities on my own.
I regret none of the money spent here and would happily continue to do so.
Living Expenses
This one is a bit surprising, it seems so much higher when I was on my own. After further digging it turns out this was for a flight back to Canada for the summer which I refunded due to Covid. I still counted the purchase because it was one I would have made under normal circumstances and I wanted it on my spendings tracker. Without the flight, both would be the same. Living in China is stupidly cheap and my lights won’t suddenly use more electricity just because I have guests over for dinner.
Making myself presentable
Both the health/hygiene and clothing categories are higher when friends came back. This would be due to 2 things, a) I go shopping more with friends, and b) I want to look nice if I’m going out with friends. Looking deeper into the data, it’s not that I spent much more per month, but that I bought a ski outfit and it was an expensive outlier that skewed the average so much higher. If I take that out I spend about $50 more than I usually would on a monthly basis.
I also bought a fancy electric toothbrush after some convincing so I blame my new level of dental hygiene on them as well. Fact: people who have friends have better teeth.
Subscriptions and surprises
Subscriptions should have stayed the same but I finally got around to cancelling this one I use for math problems. I’m a huge nerd sue me. The surprises category contains mostly gifts for friends or random purchases like new tires for a bike, matching plates etc. No surprise that my spending on gifts went up when there are people I can actually give gifts to. There is definitely an element of having friends who spend more also influence me to spend more. Some of it is coincidental because them coming back is also when I started buying healthier snacks for the students (and a few textbooks for the class). Others, like my lovely new One Plus 8T phone, are not coincidental. I love the phone though so no regrets there.
Side notes:
- I’m not a social drinker or a drinker at all, so if you are, slap on an extra $100-200 per month in savings.
- I took out some outlier expenses that just happened to fall into the friend months but weren’t friend-related, such as tuition for my master’s. However, it’s much too time-consuming to go back and dig out all the outliers and sort them properly so this 90% correct analysis will have to do. If you want a better one then you’re welcome to sponsor this blog.
Final thoughts
There was a comic about a drug-addiction study done on rats that showed the rats who recovered the best (or were the most resistant to addiction) had stronger social bonds. I think about this when I think back to myself during those initial months of quarantine. I over-ate and overslept because food made me feel good and sometimes being awake got too lonely. Laziness became the default because what was I moving for? The self-medication aspect of some of my behaviours is only apparent to me now.
Anyways, how does this tie in with finances? You know how some people stress-eat (me!) while others will lose their appetite? I believe it’s the same with money. Maybe you withdraw and end up saving a lot coincidentally but feeling depressed the entire time, or you spend to get that sweet dopamine hit you couldn’t get elsewhere.
Anyways, time to end this before it gets annoying. For this month’s homework: trying seeing how much of your financial decisions are due to other people and not yourself.