Does Spending Money on Scrapbooking Make You Happy?

Each Monday, I discuss my Scrap Happy project based on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Next week, I kick off my new monthly blog hop tied to The Happiness Project.

Today, I am going to discuss Buying Some Happiness. I was a bit skeptical of this chapter because we all know that buying something can give us a quick boost but it doesn’t usually last. Rubin’s main goals under buying some happiness are balanced. In fact they remind me of my daughter’s piggy bank, which has four slots: save, donate, invest, and spend. It might not be the perfect parallel, but it works for me.

Let’s start with spend or indulging in a modest splurge. Here’s what I came up with:

IPod speakers. I have an IPod but never bought speakers because I had an old set from my discman (remember those?). Well, I finally hooked those speakers up to my IPod but they were broke. I tossed them and decided to buy speakers for my IPod. I only spent about $20 on the speakers (they were on sale) and they are not the best speakers, but they do the job. I have them set-up in my scrapbook area so that I can listen to music and podcasts without headphones.

I bought an acid-free journaling book so that I could write my stories on the go. I considered just emailing stories to myself, using evernote, or something like that, but decided on a notebook so that I could literally tear the story out and add it to a page. Unfortunately, I haven’t told many stories in my journal and I have yet to add any of them to a layout, but I am glad I made this decision. If I were a digi scrapper, I would probably opt for an electronic version of this system.