What Would You Buy on a Weekly $6 Date?

Photo credit: Kenny Louie, CC BY 2.0.

I learned about Virgie Tovar, writer and fat acceptance/body positive activist, after listening to her Call Your Girlfriend interview with ann friedman—and when Tovar mentioned her Dear Virgie advice column at Wear Your Voice, I immediately started reading.

One of Tovar’s recent columns is especially relevant to Billfold readers:

Dear Virgie: I Need Self-Care on a Budget

Tovar offers advice about taking time for self-care and deactivating your negative self-talk loop, and then she gives her readers a specific action item: take yourself on a $6 date every week.

You know what I hate? Those weird charts that tell you that if you skip the latte that you will save $____ per year! Girl, lattes and mental health are like milk and cookies sometimes. What about the value of the ritual of taking the time to drink something delicious and smoky and warm? Don’t fall for that boot-strapping propaganda. I mean, yes it’s important not to spend the emergency fund on coffee, but I just can’t get behind the idea of skipping more and more of the joyful parts of our lives.

The great thing about this advice is that it immediately gets you thinking about all the treats you could buy for yourself. I immediately thought about all of the movies and TV shows I’ve been skipping because those $1.99 streaming episodes add up. With $6 a week, I could watch all of Going Deep With David Rees and then start making my way through Adventure Time!

It also makes you realize just how little you can buy for $6. My second thought, after my fantasy of watching every TV show I wanted, was that I could try a new shade of lipstick—but that’s definitely going to cost more than $6, unless you go with the very cheapest drugstore brand. Same goes for coffee+donut+tip, depending on the coffeeshop and how you prefer your brew. You can get all the used paperbacks you want for $0.99, but if you want a new book, you’re going to need to wait four weeks and pay $20.

But the point isn’t to think of all the things you can’t do with $6. It’s to start imagining all the things you can do. You could:

  • Visit a museum on pay-what-you-can night.
  • Buy a magazine and a candy bar.
  • Go to an ice cream shop and get a scoop in a waffle cone. Maybe even a waffle cone dipped in chocolate.
  • Go to a used bookstore or record store.
  • Go to a thrift store.
  • Buy three postcards and send them to three friends.
  • Go to a gas station and get one of those weird novelty things that they always have near the front, like a snowglobe or a little plastic statue of a moose wearing a sports jersey, and display it on your desk.

What would you do if you took yourself out on a $6 date?

(And what’s stopping you from doing it?)


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