I moved a while ago, but I am not yet done furnishing my new place. This is intended only as relatively temporary solution, though. I like the area I am in well enough, but I am not fully happy with my housing situation. For instance, I would like to grow my own food and have a chicken coop, but for that I do not have enough space yet. Such situations is a bit of a balancing act because you do not want to get too invested in a place you do not consider fully satisfactory. As I wrote in my post on getting out of the shit tier, there is the trap of getting too comfortable where you are and accepting drawbacks of your current situation. Before you know it, you got stuck in a place you do not even like that much, but everything feels familiar so you stay put.

Going from the more abstract to the concrete, I had to replace a table recently. There is not a lot of time pressure, so I could have waited for a nice antique to show up. Sometimes, you can get them quite cheaply, in particular if the furniture has some wear and tear, which, in my opinion, only adds to its charm. Yet, in the spirit of finding a table I would not grow attached to, I checked my local classified ads, and came across someone who was giving away an almost new table for free. I managed to find it online for sale and noticed that its retail price is about 400 Euros. It’s basically a slightly classier version of an IKEA piece.

The other day I went there with someone else to help me pick up the table. This was quick and easy to do. I also briefly spoke to the original owner and learned that the table was not much older than six months. It looked unused, in fact, with not a single scratch on it. Thus, I had to ask that person, incidentally a woman, why she decided to give away this perfectly fine table, and her reply stunned me. She pointed at another table in the living room and said that she liked that one better.

There are probably some of you who think nothing about spending 400 euros or dollars on something and then throwing it away. To me, her behavior was completely ridiculous, though. First, after getting some item, I would not keep looking for alternatives, and, second, I would only spend 400 euros on something I was sure I really wanted. Yet, no matter what your financial situation is, such women will find ways of wasting your money. If you barely get by and she is not used to having much money either, she will blow cash on lottery tickets and baubles. In the middle class, those women apparently keep buying clothes and furniture, and dispose of it on a whim, and in the upper class, your trophy wife will nag you about getting her a Porsche 918 Spyder because she saw some rich Chad in it, and once she realizes that she cannot really handle such a car, she will fall back on her SUV for transportation.

I do not want to imply that women should be frugal. While this has advantages, you cannot expect it. Yet, there is a big difference between being frugal and wasteful. Your women should be closer to the frugal end of the spectrum if you want to save yourself some headaches. Having a financially irresponsible girlfriend or wife whose whims you entertain, on the other hand, can completely wreck your life, and this applies to all social strata. If you let them, they will find ways to spend all the money you bring home.

There are even women who try to leech off as much money as they can and once they have financially ruined their man, they latch onto the next host. You can read about this in gossip columns but, again, the same behavior is to be found all across the socio-economic hierarchy. Some village Venus who is at most a Seven may financially ruin one or two boyfriends before she marries an engineer and financially ruins him, too. Your best defense is to pay attention to the behavior of the women you are dating, and to not be stupid with your money. Some men seem to lose a part of their brain once they have a girlfriend. They get laid, and their IQ drops by 20 or 30 points, with a lot of stupid decisions to follow.