It's been several years since I first read about the Compact, a promise to buy nothing new (with obvious exceptions like food and consumables) for a year. While my wife and I do a lot of our shopping secondhand, we never got around to doing anything formal, just a complicated array of thrifting and shopping small and/or local and a whole scale of how and where to start shopping for something.
Yeah, so, today after reading yet another post about it on the Non-Consumer Advocate, we decided to just go for it. We're starting with a one-month goal, just so that we're not complete failures if it turns out to be untenable for some reason. If the first month goes well, we can expand from there.
We're fortunate to live in the Portland metro area, which has options like one million thrift stores, including not one but four Goodwill outlet stores, dozens of Goodwills, some religious thrifts I mostly avoid, the Value Village with the hipster pricing the Pyrex, lots of smaller thrifts for things like the Humane Society, plus all the hipster-cred vintage, secondhand and antique stories you could possibly stand.
Seriously, there are parts of town where it's easier to buy secondhand things than new ones.
Which is why there's no real excuse for not trying this.
My understanding is that it's traditional to list what you will make exceptions for, and we discussed this and ours are: consumables (food, diapers, etc) (because I'm not hard core enough to cloth diaper all the time), underwear and yarn (though my wife has pledged to stash dive first and only buy if she has a specific project she has nothing for).
I'm not sure if electronic downloads count, so that's a bridge we'll cross when the new Fall Out Boy album comes out or something, I guess. It's not like I have any shortage of things to read and used bookstores to buy from.
Unfortunately, I found out today that the list of used bookstores is about to get shorter; one of my favorites is closing in the next two months or so. I did end up spending the last of my store credit on a Mercedes Lackey novel and a book about household DIY. One of the things on my list of skills to acquire besides cooking is the making of household cleaners from safe materials, so perhaps I'll have time to work on that in the near future. (If you have favorite recipes or resources, please let me know!)
This weekend, my wife and I are celebrating our second wedding anniversary and re-organizing the kitchen cabinets. I know! We're so romantic! Actually what happened is that I have finally given myself a sense of ownership in the kitchen. I'm planning to talk more about that once the organization is done.