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So, as I confess on the podcast, I am a huge fan of Gilmore Girls. The witty, lightning-speed dialogue. The cast of zany characters in the town. The love stories. And that ridiculously cute small town. The whole thing makes me wish it were fall year round and that we could all just walk around in cute sweaters while bantering with our best pals.
Buuuut at the same time, it’s not without its flaws. The pilot aired in the year 2000, and it shows. It’s definitely out of date in terms of diversity, issues like fat-shaming, and even some gender role issues (remember the Donna Reed episode??). And what’s even more disappointing is that many of those issues carried over into the 2015 Netflix revival.
Even though the show has its problems, the money lessons are timeless! We talk about a lot of those money lessons in the podcast. But for this post, I want to delve a little deeper into one of the biggest problems we see in the pilot. Rory (the daughter) gets into the fancy private school, Chilton, and then her mother Lorelai is apparently shocked at the cost of the tuition. We see Lorelai and Rory celebrating – literally jumping up and down and screaming with glee when they find out Rory’s been accepted. And at that point, we the audience have no idea that there is any trouble on the horizon with the tuition. More importantly … neither does Lorelai. She seemingly has absolutely NO idea how much tuition is going to cost. I guess she figured she’d just … wing it?
As we talked about a little on the podcast, this is a really terrible example of someone taking a major step in life without thinking through what all the financial consequences are. I mean … just imagine getting your super academically minded kid all psyched up to go to a really great school that will challenge her and be a stepping stone towards her other big goals in life, and then …. OOPS, that’s gonna cost money?? Not cool, Lorelai. Not cool.
But many of us make mistakes like this all the time. Thinking through all the financial ramifications of a new project, new hobby, or a trip, is not intuitive or easy. Home improvement is definitely the quintessential example of this – you decide you want to redo a bathroom and in the process realize that the plumbing, which you couldn’t see before, is actually pretty old and some of your pipes need replacing. That wasn’t in the budget. Or the electrical wiring is no longer up to code. Or you set out to replace one sprinkler head and then the old head won’t unscrew and you have to cut out the entire section of pipe that the old sprinkler head was connected to and put in new pipe and then attach the new sprinkler head to the new pipe. Not that we have any personal experience with that …
But it’s not just home improvement. With the subscription model soaring in popularity these days, all kinds of new gadgets and toys end up costing way more than the actual purchase price. Case in point – I was recently looking at a home camera that would allow us to keep an eye on our beloved dog, Miles, while we’re not at home. It was super cheap – just $20! And it had great reviews. But lo and behold, when you read the reviews of the camera, you see that it won’t function at all unless you pay a $3 monthly subscription.
Three bucks is obviously dirt cheap. But with all the items that push subscriptions on you these days, they can very quickly add up. You make a great move and cancel cable, but then months later realize you’ve accumulated subscriptions to 5 or 6 streaming services and suddenly you’re no longer saving anything. Or you buy exercise equipment that doesn’t even function without a $40-per-month subscription. And even gadgets or services that function just fine without a subscription still push them on you all the time. We like playing trivia games on our Amazon Alexa device, but every time we play, we end up shouting at her several times that NO, we don’t want to subscribe to the go$#*%@ mother$*@&!%^ crap she’s trying to shove down our throats so we can get even more trivia for $5-10 per month. If we subscribed to everything that gets advertised to us, we’d be spending close to $1,000 per month on TV, gift boxes full of stuff we don’t need or want, ad-free podcasts, exercise subscriptions, and of course – trivia games.
It’s insanity. The point is, hidden costs are everywhere. And even though many subscription costs aren’t really hidden, they seem so small and innocent, looking at you with big puppy-dog eyes, calling out: “But I”m only a few dollars a month!”
But alll those things that only cost a few dollars a month will quickly strangle your financial goals if you don’t keep them under control. So try to learn from Lorelai and Rory. Before you buy anything, sign up for anything, plan to take on a big new project, or get your daughter psyched to go to a fancy new school, keep a close, keen eye on what costs might pop up and rear their ugly heads down the road. (Like private schools, which, y’know … charge tuition.)