Gifts Versus Expenses

In honor of Valentine's Day, here's my half-formed hypothesis: that a gift is just an expense unless it involves a sacrifice by the giver, and a desire to please the recipient. Let's test the hypothesis, shall we?

Example #1: Shiner's Valentine's Day promise to build me a stone path from the back deck to the garage after the ground thaws. It's a big expense in terms of time and labor, and something I have been wanting since I first moved into this house. An excellent gift!

Example #2: Homer's gift to Marge of a bowling ball. An expense, sure, especially with the fancy engraving... "Homer." Not so much motivated by a desire to please Marge. Fail!

Example #3: My Valentine's Day gift to Shiner. A gift certificate to his favorite homebrew shop. He loves it, and there are a number of new toys he's been eyeing, so I doubt it will last the weekend. But we had a modest $20 spending limit (which I misremembered as $25) and it certainly didn't take a lot of time or energy to plunk down a credit card, so I'm not so conviced that I gave a very good gift, even my my own standards.

This Week's Carnival Love

This week I had posts featured in two carnivals: at Paid Twice, the Carnival of Personal Finance featured my post Money Mind Freak, and over at Money Changes Things, BPT included my post The Outsourced Uterus in the Carnival of Ethics, Values, and Personal Finance. Thanks to both for hosting!