This is my goal. I used to be 3 (buy and worry later), trying to be 2 (budget month by month), but am realistically 5 (overspend occasionally). So voted 5.
At the point where semi-retirement consulting is a possibility in 5-10 years. Kids are almost through college, house still has mortgage but lots of equity, 401K adequately funded and growing. I consider the money left over after monthly bills to be play money but occasionally have to dip into cash savings for things like trips and spring/fall wine releases, Berserker Day or just plain late-night-had-a-few-glasses-and-on-the-internet impulse buys.
I hold pretty tight to a 2 grand limit per year. We have no mortgage, no children to school, and a stable 200 grand retirement income. I could spend more but don’t get enough pleasure from higher priced bottles to justify. I have gotten more willing to open up the purse strings for the vintage ports and stickies that my better half enjoys, but for me the limit is $50-60 per. I am also afraid of becoming accustomed to only the next level. While I may be in the kiddie pool on this board, I am viewed as serious wine snob by my non-wine friends. It is all relative.
Still figuring out this wine budget thing, I’ll go through phases of not buying very much to wanting to stash stuff away so it’s rarely consistent. I’ll say that as a 25 year-old, a lot of peers my spend at least my equivalent of a wine budget on dining out. And this isn’t celebration meals, or ones where you’re trying to learn to something, just like daily sustenance sort-of thing. This gives me some peace of mind.
We are older, retired, and “relatively” stable. Technically, I should probably never buy another bottle for the rest of my life. Mortgage is minimal, kids finished with college so we can relax and travel. However, since this is an “affliction,” I still buy a decent amount of wine but have slowed down considerably. The only time I did something “reckless” was taking a credit union loan to buy '82 Bordeaux futures. That worked out pretty well but is something that cannot be duplicated in today’s crazy market.
I have a monthly budget that rolls (positive or negative) forward each month and we have had to adjust each year. Right now we have basically run out of storage space, and I am unwilling to pay for a locker, so I think that our buying may slow down a bit (particularly after Berserker Day for the first time). One problem is that with our son born in 2018, I will need to go big for 2018 Bordeaux! Nonetheless, wine spending remains an item that is after all other financial needs have been met.
“Are you just so rich that you dont even think about the money” and “Do you only spend surplus money after all bills, savings, college funds, 401K’s, savings etc have been fully funded”
We have it set up so all of our bills, fixed costs, savings, et cetera come out of our paychecks into a clearinghouse account automatically so we never “see” that money, so in that regard it is option 1, but until recently we never really sat down and budgeted our wine spending out so I actually picked option 3 since we’ve been known to have bouts of mania re: wine.
Everything we see in our checking acct after that is for groceries and whatever we want to buy that week (dining out, stuff on Amazon, whatever), which is where our wine spending comes out of. Technically it’s “gravy” as our fixed costs and savings are covered but we sometimes overspend. This year we’re more rigorously tracking how our “gravy” is utilized so we could up our savings rate. We’ve started putting away ~25% of our take-home on top of our pension/401(k) contributions which is fairly painful week-to-week, but it’s working out. Consequently our wine purchasing has had to become more methodical.
Cheers to the kiddie pool! While we’re in a different life situation (mortgage, kids in elementary school, far from retirement), our budget level is in the same ballpark as yours - under $3k. When we started paying attention to wine in 2008 or so, the limit was miniscule, and it’s slowly grown over time. We like having wine with meals each weekend and sharing with friends, so staying on target means lots of bargain hunting and selective purchasing over $20/bottle or so. $40+ purchases are rare.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
