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Doing my US tax return has made me re-evaluate my pre-lockdown life | Emma Brockes

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In March in the US, at the start of the pandemic, federal tax deadlines were pushed back to July. This three-month extension, intended to give us a break, means that many of us are compiling our spreadsheets this week. It’s never a happy experience, being reminded of just how much money flew out of your account on things that a year later you’d quite like to put back. This year, however, it’s more unsettling than usual. Going through my credit card bills this week was like watching recovered movie footage from a lost civilisation.

Spending habits have changed radically since March, through a combination of necessity, lack of opportunity and a change in psychology, and it’s those last two that are most glaringly surreal. Combing through outgoings for 2019 revealed not only wanton levels of spending on my part, mostly on incidental items, but also wanton levels of movement.

What on earth was I doing? I seemed constantly to be having haircuts and making 13 separate purchases from the same vending machine. So many cabs. Where was I going? And why, every time I went there, did I feel obliged to buy at the very minimum two $4 (£3.20) pastries and three coffees?

The bar bills. The tally for the pizza place next to my kids’ after-school club, where we seemed to have dinner fully three nights a week. (Why on earth did I let them have the organic bullshit lemonade, a staggering $5 a bottle?). I can trace our movements around the city almost down to the minute via receipts from our near-constant need to consume.

This exercise should, of course, be delivering a lesson in personal finance that will last me to the end of my days. And the amount of drive-by spending enabled just by leaving the house is shocking. (This is before we even get to the airports. A separate snack item from every branch of Hudson News in Terminal 7, plus the $10 print edition of the New Yorker so I don’t have to wait until after take-off to start reading the free digital edition on my phone? Yes, please!)

It doesn’t, however, change much. You don’t undo these kinds of consumer reflexes easily and if they’ve been squashed somewhat under lockdown, that energy is still looking for release. Some people, I know, have gone mad spending online, which I’ve managed to avoid. My grocery bill on the other hand is three times what it was. In a million years before lockdown I would never have bought $10 salami, or posh Italian tuna in a bottle instead of a can. Now I don’t even hesitate, deploying the same shonky economics I’ve always used to justify spending. I can’t go to the cinema so I’m going to buy the posh tuna. In fact by buying the posh tuna I am not merely saving money, I’m practically making it. And so on.

It’s still much less of a monthly spend than before, although less steep a drop, perhaps, than that of consumers in higher earning categories. This week, economists at the University of Toronto released findings about spending habits since lockdown started, and discovered that, while in March spending dropped in the lowest income households by 30%, that it has now rallied – after stimulus cheques from the government arrived and unemployment benefits went up – to only 5% less than normal. Meanwhile, spending in the highest income brackets has fallen by 36% and is not recovering nearly as fast.

Rich people are spending less, in other words, partly because the things they spend on – restaurants, entertainment, vacations – aren’t available, but also, in some analyses, because they are more sensible than those with less money. Personal finance experts have been quick to pop up this week and jump on the figures as a way to chastise people on lower incomes for not saving more. The $600 a week top-up in unemployment benefits is due to expire next month. Deferred bills will arrive. The tax deadline looms. And then what?

These analyses overlook how stretched many Americans were before the pandemic, and how those living up to their income ceiling aren’t being extravagant but merely making ends meet. It also overlooks the fact that trivial, “unnecessary” expenditure is harder to forgo in the absence of larger consolations, such as sitting out the summer in the Hamptons. So much has changed since March, but not this: the small overpriced luxury as unit of happiness.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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