Long and short around the house

There's an eternal struggle around the house about how the money flows out. Tell me something else new, I hear you saying.

I don't know if there's a standard gender breakdown, but I know in my household Mary is long in orientation, biased towards making purchases of furniture and other durable goods, ready to cost-control on a day by day basis to do so. I tend to view a lot of that stuff as adding overhead: it can get messed up, it needs to be maintained, it generally ups the ante so that it makes other stuff look cheaper. It also needs to be carried out when you move. And the old stuff it replaces needs to get carried out of the house, which is easier said than done.

I, on the other hand, have a short-term bias. I want to spend money on things that relieve stress in the short term. Mostly we're talking about take out, which removes the need for stressful cooking and dishwashing. Or going out, for the same reason. It's wasteful, but there's not future labor commitment built into it. The same goes for travel. I'm all for it, just too lazy to get it done.

On the other hand, for some perverse reason, I always feel somehow enriched after doing real and quasi-real capital expenditures. I got a warm fuzzy after plowing 700 odd bucks into brakes for the 1996 Subaru the other day, as if it brought me and the car closer together. Not really rational.