Spendthrifts

I've seen this working paper on the attraction between spendthrifts and tightwads in the blogosphere today. I haven't read it yet, but thinking about my own life, my fiancee and I are actually pretty similar in terms of our spending habits. If I was forced to label ourselves, I would say we were either "selective spendthrifts" or "tightwads by reason of pickiness", which is to say that we are usually very thrifty, except that we will deploy very large sums of money for stuff we think highly valuable.

The trick is that the list of things we think are highly valuable is small, so, for example, I end up wearing a mix of dress shoes so expensive I'm ashamed to mention them and shoes I bought used off e-bay, whereas someone less odd would nix the former and just buy a bunch of new, reasonably priced, Allen Edmonds.