As my wife and I slowly start to build our cash reserves, and continue to recover from the financial torture known as college tuition, we have noticed that we’ve began to look at expenditures we would never have even considered before.

The first expenditure we started talking about was a vacation. We have never taken a genuine vacation before on our own dime. Our honeymoon was used with money from our wedding (which was wonderful, but also only two nights in a town thirty minutes from my wife’s hometown), and all other vacations have been with my family. The problem was not only the cost of a vacation, but the realization of what that money could otherwise be used for.

I inherited my father’s perspective on vacations: The money that would be spent in a few days vacation could instead be invested in our house on something that would be used every day for years and years. For instance, as a graduation present (to myself), I purchased a HDTV for $1600. For the same price, my wife and I could have taken a four night vacation to California. If it was a choice between one or the other, I absolutely would have chosen the TV, as it’s something I will use and appreciate every day for the next several years.

Of course now that we are both working full time without college costs, spending $2000 on a vacation actually seems like a viable option. Am I booking my tickets to the Bahamas right now? Of course not! Our absolute first priority is filling up our emergency savings fund to $10,000, which as you can see on the sidebar is only 35% of the way there.

(As a quick aside, I am happy to say that I took $1000 of my tax refund and put it right into that emergency savings account. The remaining money went to pay a high repair and maintenance bill for my car).

It’s not only high cost vacations that we’re considering now. I went and bought new clothes for the second time in three years, and that’s no exaggeration. The first time was four months ago when I was hired for my current job and needed nicer clothes. Now though, I find myself browsing catalogs after realizing that my clothes from 1999 need some updating. I have also found that clothes are one of the deadly items that don’t “hurt” when I purchase them, since I have always considered them necessary expenses. But when the line between “necessary” and “chic” starts to fade, it can be very dangerous to control the amount of money spent on clothes.

The last expenditure I’ll mention is furniture. We recently needed a new coffee table, as the $19 table we bought from Ikea two years ago was simply too small. So we thought we would take a big step forward and purchase our first piece of actual furniture made from real wood, as nearly all of our furniture is fake wood.

We went to a well known discount furniture store in the Boston area called Jordan’s Furniture. There we found about two or three dozen different coffee tables, several of which we liked. They were all around $250-$300.

We spend another fifteen minutes in there before getting in the car and driving an hour to the nearest Ikea, where we found a coffee table for $70 that served our needs perfectly and looked good too (at least in the medium brown color).

So in the end, we’ve written off vacations for the time being and are still shopping around for cheap furniture. As they say, two out of three ain’t bad.