Shopping at Macy's

I love nice clothes.  We all love nice clothes.  Back when I was married to my favorite ex-husband, I used to buy all my clothes at Nordstom, even my underwear, and thought nothing of it.  It was my own personal store and I didn't care if I paid full price.  It never entered my mind to shop the sale.  I thought those days were over.  We were in a race to see who could spend the most money and I was winning until the race car.  When he decided to pretend he was 16 again and go chase blonds, I went through all the stages of money grief, along with the other, of course.  The stage that I stayed in the longest was denial.  I have noticed that there are a lot of ladies out there still stuck in that stage.  I spent like I still had it and after a serious illness, I had pretty much blown through all my divorce money.

After some more denial and credit card abuse, I called a halt.  At first, I thought I had to live like a bag lady.  We all know her and we are terrified of becoming like her.  I started reading anything that I could get my hands on about budgeting.  There are different kinds of budgeting.  There is the usual kind where nobody has any fun and life can be pretty gray.  Then there is my kind, where with patience and a plan, you end up with a custom fit monthly budget, an occasional budget for things like vet bills, new fridges, insurance, medical bills, Christmas, etc. and a nice savings account.   I will show you how this is done in a later post but now I want to talk about shopping in the new real world.

I buy most of my clothes at Macy's these days.  They have killer sales and send out these cool coupons every so often that you can combine with a sale.  I got all my Calvin Klein jeans for 50% off and then used a coupon for 20% more.  Those coupons are like free money.  They also work really well on nice towels.  I worked the last One Day Sale and got six really nice Martha Stewart towels for under $30.  You can't even get crappy towels at Wal Mart for that.  I got five summer tops for under $100 and one of them was a Ralph Lauren.  The hitch with those babies is that you have to use your Macy's card and they don't work on some things, like cosmetics, so read 'em carefully.  Then go home and billpay your Macy's card.  Their interest is beyond crazy.  Just about everything in that store is going to go on sale and 50% discounts happen quite regularly.  It doesn't hurt to get to know your saleslady either.  They sometimes whisper in your ear to wait a week before buying something.

I always keep all my receipts because if something doesn't fit right or I don't just love it or it hangs in my closet for a couple of weeks, it needs to go back.  I have returned things that have shrunk or lost their luster in the laundry.  I shudder when I think of the bags of things that went to the Goodwill with their tags still attached.  Those days are over.  I work hard for my money and you do too.  You are going to hear that a lot from me.