Saturday, January 21

The High Price of Materialism


I posted this a while back on Facebook, but wanted to post it here too.

A few interesting points made in the video:

- As materialism goes up, care for the earth goes down.
- People focus more on material things when they feel insecure.  
- The more people are exposed to the media, the more materialistic they are.
- As intrinsic values go up, materialism goes down. 

Materialism is easy to succumb to all the time, especially when having a baby!  There are checklists everywhere that tell me all of the things I need to buy and all the clothes are so cute!  I think our decision to be surprised about the gender of our baby has helped me curb the urge to buy cute clothes, at least (and it has probably kept others from buying too many clothes for our baby too!)

The nest has an article that suggests we should budget $30,000 for a baby!  Whoa.  Fortunately, we have been given many things that friends nearby don't need anymore, and we've been able to get a few good quality things we wanted off of craigslist.  Through an online forum, I recently came across this article on the real cost of raising children and this one on the what newborns really need that are helpful in keeping perspective as well. 

2 comments:

Madame Angela Baggett said...

a lot depends on who you are too. We used our stroller tons and tons, my cousin got an expensive jogging stroller, but she has used it on 3 kids, during winter too while skiing and can sell it for a good portion of what she paid. We had nearly everything given to us, by family or friends (new and used). Unfortunately you don't realize what was most helpful except by retrospect- some babies love a swing and others do not. Some things they use such a short time and my sister found that at her church someone would share an expensive item and then everyone would have their turn with it as their child reached the age they would benefit most from it. Some neat ways to be community and not hoard so much stuff!

Unknown said...

Yeah, another thing that helps us is having limited space - we don't want to crowd out our apartment! But, I agree that buying quality is worth it when possible.