How do people decide what are, to them, trivial sums of money? For example, if there's something I want on a whim and it's less than $10 I'll probably buy it without much consideration. If it's $15 I'll deliberate a bit more and probably not buy it without good reason.
I know people who make less money than I do who consider larger amounts to be trivial, and I know people who make more than I do who are more frugal. If people were rational there would be some common percentage range of disposable income that would be considered trivial, but I'm not sure if that's the case.
So how small does a purchase have to be for you to consider it trivial? I know some marriages where the spouses have an agreement to discuss expenditures of more than, say, $100, but that seems like too high of a threshold to qualify as "trivial" to most people.
Beware the fallacy of "objective value." There's no such thing.
I'm cavalier about money generally, mostly because I have other things to worry about; if any of them came true, my expenditures, income and savings would have no bearing on my "quality of life." When I was younger and mostly concerned with...well, with what most young men are mostly concerned with, I sometimes obsessed over money. In the argot of those mercifully-bygone days, it "did bad things to my head."
A tangent: Most people's sense of wealth derives from their savings, while their sense of security derives from their income. According to some studies done in the Sixties, they value income changes linearly, but savings changes at their square root. That is, a doubling of their income would make them feel twice as secure, but it would take a quadrupling of their savings to make them feel twice as rich.
And everyone will carp and crab over any increase in gasoline prices, however small.
FP: I'd love to see those studies. It makes sense though, since income is basically the derivative of savings.
For me, I would think that an expenditure over $50 would require informing one's spouse. Talk to my boyfriend about that though and he'd probably give a much higher number.
Depends on my circumstances.
if i've got a few grand in savings, income coming in, retirement money being socked away, and a few hundred bucks in the bank, then the number is higher. when i've got no savings and i'm waiting for my next paycheck, 2.50 on coffee is nontrivial. But it's also higher for certain KINDS of things.
100 bucks is a trivial amount of money to spend for something as worthwhile as a textbook I want; 100 bucks is a non-trivial amount of money for me to spend on wine. 100 bucks is a trivial amount of money for me to spend on computer hard drives, because for that I get 200 GIGS of disk space. 100 bucks on tickets to a concert I want to go to? Nontrivial.
Most people really don't value money the way you might think they do. Look at all sorts of studies on gambling/game theory and you can see this. The games of the sorts "pick between two boxes; one contains 100 bucks; the other contains with probably 1/10 1000 bucks; which do you pick" results show that people don't compute the expected value of the win and pick the outcome with the higher expectation. Particularly not with money. Change the numbers, and watch the numbers change. of course, people also think that a larger salary will make them "Rich", even if their net worth is the same..
I have to agree with A. When there's a box of my favorite doughnuts at the market, well, everybody needs a little indulgence sometime. But when my kids start insisting on going to McDonalds more than once every few weeks, suddenly the budget is too tight to accommodate them.