Should I Stay in My Lane?

Sorry again for the long haitus. We have been juggling a lot with unpacking, getting ready for our housewarming party, which was lovely, building a farmhouse table in time for our party guests to distress with random tools, and selling our house. In case you were wondering, we went with option 2, selling to the investor for $225k, with them paying for all the closing costs.

There are never any good excuses for not writing for three whole weeks, but I suppose these reasons are better than most that I give. We're settling back in to a normal routine and I'm aiming to publish something new every Monday until our next trip in July. Here's to making it happen.
The other day I was in a grocery store in our new neighborhood, when I overheard a woman giving her elderly mother, who just happened to be in an electric scooter, a hard time over a soda purchase. The old woman wanted to buy diet grape soda, but it wasn't on sale: it was $1.89. For two liters.

"You don't finish the diet in time. It goes bad," the middle aged daughter was saying.

"And then it's just a waste," her husband chimed in.

"But I like the diet grape," the old woman protested.

"We buy a lot of soda. It adds up. Let's just buy the one that's on sale."

"But I'm paying," the old woman noted "and I like the grape."

But her daughter was not having it: they were going to buy the soda that was fifty cents cheaper and that was that. 

I had to catch myself from saying something to them or, god forbid, offering just to buy the soda for the old woman. I'm nosy like that, and apparently pretty judge-y, too, as I'm writing a whole blog post about this family's in-store debate on soda purchasing strategies. 

This probably says more about me than this family, but I really wanted to step in and point out that, as much as I'm a fan of frugality, there were probably better areas to focus those cost saving strategies. And that at a certain point, you're just being cheap instead of frugal. And, dang it, the woman has lived a long life and is sitting in a Rascal scooter and she likes the diet grape soda, and it's her money anyway, and she raised you. Let her buy the soda that she wants, you big jerk.

But I have to wonder, why should I care? What other people want to do with their money, or, if they're really controlling, with their adorable elderly parent's money, is not my business. Can't I just focus on my own shopping list and not eavesdrop on the minutia of random strangers in the supermarket? 

Do I not have enough going on in my life? Maybe I need a new hobby.

I know that the healthiest thing is just to keep my own side of the street clean, put my head down, and focus on my own financial situation. That's what a normal person would do, right?

But there's also a reason that some of us write blogs about personal finance, instead of just pursuing our financial goals in private. For better or worse, those of us who write about this stuff are interested in seeing other people make better financial decisions, too. And, sure, that's probably not going to involve things like making better beverage purchases. But it does involve better perspectives about money: about when it matters, and when it doesn't. The times when we think about it too much, and when we're clearly not paying enough attention. When we should try to save, and when it's okay to just let grandma get her stupid grape soda.

So while I'm probably not going to start chiming in with advice for people I run into in aisle nine, and while there are plenty of grey areas where there is no "right" answer, I want to give myself permission to criticize the whack financial decisions we stumble across all the time as Americans. And yeah, that applies to my dumb ass decisions, too. 

Because if it's taboo for us to point out the dumb things we are doing with money, how exactly are we supposed to improve?