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Ohhh, friends. It is time to dig our claws into the financial shenanigans of the four lovely ladies of Sex and the City. Hold onto your Manolo Blahniks! What’s that? You don’t own Manolo Blahniks? Get OUT. We don’t want your kind around here! Only the most well-heeled allowed.
Juuust kidding. Most days, yours truly rocks these bad boys:
Robert clarification: Note that these are Carla’s shoes, not mine. Also, hers are decidedly more mud-covered and holey. She’s SO uncultured. Carla rebuttal: OK, Mr. “I wore these Altras daily until the tread was genuinely unsafe”:
Nearly new tread on Altras
And the nearly gone tread on Robert’s Altras he should’ve replaced ages ago
Needless to say, high heels and high-fashion shoes of any form are not our jam. BUT, both shoes pictured above are pretty pricey. My beloved Oboz cost $140 new. I got mine gently used at an REI garage sale for about $95. But still not cheap. Robert’s Altras also go for $140. Both these shoes are, however, extremely well made, comfortable, and good for hiking and taking our beloved dog, Miles, for long walks every day. And they’re perfect for our lives now that we don’t go into a fancy office all the time (and likely never will again). So on a per-wear basis, our shoe costs are fantastic. If I wear my Oboz that I got on sale for $95 about 900 times before they give out, that’s a per-wear cost of 10.5 cents. For a full-pair price of Altras or Oboz that we wear 900 times, that’s a per-wear cost of 15.5 cents. I’d happily pay 15 cents to wrap my feet in a protected cocoon of comfort each time I step out the door.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are shoes of the sort that Carrie Bradshaw, the main character of Sex and the City wears on the regular. They are both uncomfortable and way, way, WAY more expensive than any shoe I’ve ever bought. Louboutins, Manolos, Pradas, blah blah blah, the list goes on. To take an example, let’s look at one of the most remembered pairs of shoes from the series – the blue Manolo Blahniks that Big proposes to Carrie with instead of a ring:
These blue bedazzled torture devices will run you about $995 today. Just … hang on a second while I try to pick my jaw back up from the floor real quick.
In the Ring a Ding Ding episode that we cover this week, we see Carrie estimate that she has about 100 pairs of shoes that cost at least $400 apiece. And at the same time she’s trying desperately to figure out where all her money has gone. Hmmmm. Hmmmmm. Maybe it’s the $40k you’ve spent on shoes!!
Let’s calculate what Carrie’s average cost-per-wear is for her shoes. If she has 100 pairs of shoes, she likely doesn’t wear each one more than a few times per year. And even though these shoes are hopefully well made, they’re still SHOES. You wear them on your FEET and walk through dirt and grime and rain and goodness only knows what else. And high heels are inherently way more fragile than any other type of shoe. These things can’t last that long. So I’m going to estimate that she’ll get about … 30 wears out of each shoe. And I feel like that’s being pretty generous and also not taking into account that she’s a fashionista and might reject a pair for no longer being trendy when it’s still in good shape. So at $400 per pair and 30 wears, her per-wear-cost is $13.33.
THIRTEEN DOLLARS AND THIRTY-THREE CENTS PER DAY! That is a pretty generous food budget. (Except, not for Carrie, because she eats out all the time.) That is an insane amount of money to spend on things that are terribly uncomfortable, bad for your feet and back, not durable, and insanely overpriced. The only other habit I can think of that’s objectively worse is drugs or smoking. Which … oh yeah. Carrie also does that:
I realize that because you’re reading a financial blog like this one, I’m probably preaching to the choir. Tuning out the obsession with luxury brands and overpriced name-brand goods that we see glorified in Sex and the City is 101 level stuff if you’re trying to put your financial house in order. And I get that I’m being super judgy about Carrie’s purchases because it’s so outside my wheelhouse. There’s nothing inherently wrong with loving shoes and fashion as long as you can afford it. But as we talk about in this episode, Carrie decidedly canNOT afford her lifestyle.
She would have been very well served to think about her shoe costs on a per-use basis. It’s an eye-opening exercise. Not just for shoes but for everything. $15 a month at Planet Fitness sounds like a really good deal, but only if you go several times a week. $20 for a cute shirt seems like a fun and innocent purchase, but only if it’s good quality and won’t end up shrinking or looking dingy and faded the first time you wash it. Otherwise, you just spent $20 to wear a shirt once.
We thought about this a lot when I was shopping for wedding dresses. Sure, it’s a special day and you want to look great, have beautiful photos, and remember it fondly forever. But also … you’re only going to wear the thing for a few damn hours. Is it really worth thousands and thousands of dollars for one wear?
I’m sure Carrie Bradshaw wouldn’t even hesitate to say yes. But, I’m also sure that Carrie Bradshaw thought $400 times 100 was $4,000 and not $40,000. Which … um, it’s DEFINITELY $40,000. So she isn’t awesome at math or money. But YOU are. So next time you’re shopping, don’t forget to do a per-use calculation on whatever it is you’re considering. Otherwise, you might end up charging yourself $13.33 every day just to walk out of the house with shoes on your feet.