Geek on a Budget: Four Money Saving Tips I Learned from Gilmore Girls

I think you can learn quite a few things from watching your favorite TV shows and movies such as home decor tips to money tips. And for this Geek on a Budget post, I noticed something interesting about how some of the Gilmore Girls characters deal with money. Here are the four things I learned:


1. Don't Order Take Out Food Daily

Throughout the series Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory either ordered take out food from the various places around Stars Hollow or got something to eat at Luke's Diner on a daily basis. That's a lot of money when you stop and think about it. I think the hard part for serial take out foodies will be breaking the convenience factor and cutting expenses by cooking a few meals at home throughout the week.



2. Curb Your Coffee Consumption (or Other Habitual Budget Busters)

Lorelai (and Rory) pretty much have a coffee addiction and they drink copious amounts of it daily. Lorelai not only drinks a cup of coffee at home (when she makes it from her coffee maker) but then orders another at Luke's Diner and then will get another cup at her inn, the Dragonfly Inn. And that's only describing her morning, she continues to drink coffee throughout the day. That's a lot of coffee she's paying for and although she co-owns the Dragonfly Inn with her friend and business partner Sookie St. James, those free cups of coffee she drinks at the inn are still costing her money because it's coming out of their company's expenses.

I used Lorelai's coffee consumption as an example of a habitual budget buster because it's something she buys on a regular basis. If she would simply cut back on drinking so much coffee, she could easily save herself quite a bit of money.




3. Small Savings Can Equal Big Rewards

There are two characters I think are great at saving money: Lane Kim and Kirk Gleason. When Lane's band Hep Alien went out on a summer tour, she managed to save $9000 for the band by not fully disclosing how much they were making per gigs and merchandise sales. With every member of the band scrimping and saving it allowed her to make sure the band made a real profit and lets face it if those guys knew how much money she was saving they would have spent it as soon as they made it. To prove my point, her fellow band mates Brian Fuller and Zack Van Gerbig (who was also her boyfriend at the time) used the money to impulsively buy recording equipment.

As for Kirk, he managed to save up a large amount of money (over $250,000) due to his nonstop abundance of jobs, cutting his expenses by living at home with his mother, haggling over prices and being an extremely annoying cheapskate. According to Kirk, in the episode "Blame Booze and Melville" (season 5 episode 21) he said "I’ve saved every dollar I ever made. That, and the miracle of compound interest, has created a bounty of a quarter of a million dollars."

Saving money doesn't have to be hard, if you make an effort to save a little bit consistently over time, you can save money without having to be a cheapskate like Kirk.




4. Never Work in a Store That Sells Your Favorite Things

During spring break, Rory Gilmore got a job at Stars Hollow Books. She was hired to help count the store's inventory and while she was completing that task, she was also creating piles of books that she wanted to buy. In the end she spent more money buying books than she earned. As someone who is a big bookworm, I always knew not to work at a bookstore because being surrounded by books would totally have me wanting to buy as many of them as I could.

If possible never work in a store that sells your favorite things because you don't want to be like Rory where you are tempted to spend money instead of saving.