Last week, I ordered a new pair of running shoes. Your first reaction to that sentence might have been, “Lol seriously? Look at the featured image on this post, bro.” If so, you’re not alone!
In fact, Jess tends to make fun of me every time I tell her that I’m thinking about ordering shoes. “I don’t know why you need seven pairs of running shoes,” she says. “But if there’s room in the budget, knock yourself out.”
That part is really important. While my shoe rack might not suggest this, we nitpick over every dollar that comes in on a monthly basis—and more importantly, we nitpick over what goes out.
This post won’t go into every single detail about how Jess and I think about our finances (trust me, it would bore you to into a deep slumber), but I thought I’d write this down because a few people have actually asked. So, here are a few basic concepts that help us plan for more than just the occasional order from Running Warehouse.
Create a Budget Every Dang Month
There are millions of free budgeting templates available online, and a lot of them merely suggest that you should cut avocado toast out of your life. Sound stupid? That’s because it really is stupid.
Instead, Jess and I create a zero-based budget every month. You can read this post for a longer explanation, but the tl;dr is that we add up how much money we’ll earn and decide how we want to spend each dollar of it. This is particularly important now that I’m a freelancer with an unpredictable income, but we did this exercise every month even when I was working full time.
Before we even consider discussing running shoes, here’s a quick list of things we make sure are covered:
- Rent, food, transportation, and other essential utilities such as lights and water
- Diapers for the little guy and other household goods
- Savings, renter’s and life insurance, and recurring charitable donations
It gets a little more fun once we get that far. Jess and I have been doing this for a while, so we know that we tend to order takeout very often and plan accordingly. This is also the part where we think through things such as upcoming birthdays, date nights we’ve been putting off, and whether or not we should cancel our Hulu subscription. And once we’ve discussed those things, then and only then do I feel comfortable asking for a few dollars for running shoes.
We use a tool called EveryDollar to stay accountable to whatever we agree on every month, but there are a few other apps that you can take for a spin. In case you’re curious, EveryDollar looks something like this.
Want to give this a try? If you’re like us, you might mess it up at first. It took us several months to come even remotely close to getting in a groove. But once you get used to it, you might find it more enjoyable than ever to order running shoes. Or you might hate me for suggesting this and never read this blog again. What a slippery slope!
Retire Shoes When They’re (Actually) Toast
A certain triathlete-turned-marathoner once suggested that you should swap out your shoes earlier than you think you should. That’s probably good advice if you’re a pro athlete with several sponsorships. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense for me. We’re not starving, but I also like to make sure that I get every last mile out of a shoe before I order another pair (with one notable exception).
Of course, I’d never suggest run in a shoe that you know is toast. For example, I recently hung up a pair of Beacon 2s after just over 200 miles because the outsole had worn down, my feet hurt like hell in them during a recovery run, and the New Balance logo began peeling off. This also forced me to accept a difficult truth: I had a perfectly good pair of recovery day shoes on the shelf with at least 200 miles left on them.
I haven’t always liked this idea. When a new colorway comes out in one of the few shoes that work for my feet, it’s hard not to reach for my debit card.
OK fine, I’m not always great about following through on this, especially when we have the room in the budget. On a somewhat unrelated note, Jess will happily regale you with the story of how I begged for forgiveness after splurging on a Nintendo Switch. I’m working on it though.
If Running Shoes Aren’t in the Budget, Don’t Buy Them
I took up running in response to losing my job in 2015. We didn’t have a ton of disposable income back then, so I put at least 100 miles on a pair of Crossfit shoes I got for free. A few months later, I used some birthday cash to buy my first real pair of running shoes—and I put at least 600 miles on them. Why? Really, because I had to.
For about a year, we…didn’t have a lot left after the essentials. And it kind of sucked! Jess frequently had to tell coworkers that she couldn’t join them for lunch at Chipotle because we didn’t have wiggle room in the budget. For the sake of paying our bills, I appreciated it but would be lying if I said it didn’t kill me a little bit each time.
We’re fortunate not to be living like that right now, but our approach to buying things like running shoes remains the same today, especially now that we have a kid. We threw him a birthday party recently and I’ll take this opportunity again to say that it sucks for you that we don’t post pictures of the baby because he is the best. After we wrote the checks for the venue, food, and decorations, there wasn’t money left for running shoes, even though I “needed” them. So I waited a month. Spoiler alert, I did not die!
Is this budgeting thing always fun? Nope! New Balance has released some sweet shoes for wide feet like mine and I want them all. But it does keep me sane. And it also prevents me from cleaning out my kid’s college fund because I want to run a personal best in the marathon.
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