For this week’s segment of Money Diaries, Montreal artist and writer Gaby Dupuis documents an average week of spending and complaining as she navigates life after grad school. Gaby makes 40k at a university administration job that she swears is only temporary.
Saturday
I’m in Val-Morin, Quebec (by choice!) for a weekend ski trip with my boyfriend and two of our friends. I don’t even really like or know how to ski in any technically-sound way, but I just want to be involved. I’m much more interested in the general vibes around skiing versus the actual activity itself. I want my legs up by a fire in a cherry-wood accented cabin. I want to gaze up from a novel, moved by the gentle falling of snow outside. Instead I am spending $13.51 on a lukewarm chicken panini and a too-sweet hot chocolate from the ski resort chalet. It is less a chalet and more a cafeteria under the dominion of seemingly infinite small screaming children and their parents, who seem unconcerned that their offspring have set my cottage-core fantasy ablaze. I abandoned the mountain and my friends after a total of four (4) runs down the hill, and have resigned myself to reading in this cafeteria until everyone’s ready to leave. A grown woman sitting beside me has her barefoot out. Is this what rich people call après-ski?
- $13.51 = 1 demoralizing chicken panini + 1 hot chocolate
After my friends finally tire themselves out, I’m rescued from the “chalet” and we stop by an IGA on our way back to our Airbnb to pick up ingredients to make dinner.
- $11.46 = my share of a modest grocery haul
Daily Total = $24.97
Sunday
Our trip up north happened to coincide with the biggest snowstorm of the season, so our drive back to the city feels like the beginning of an apocalypse movie. The highway has been completely overtaken by snow and sheets of ice. Anything beyond the car ahead of us has vanished into a white void, and cars are swerving wildly all around us. “Bumpy Ride” by Mohombi is blaring in Maya’s mom’s Prius as I anticipate my tragic demise on the side of a road in rural Quebec.
- $10 = my contribution for gas
Against all odds we get back to Montreal corporeally intact, and the lingering euphoria from an overall wholesome weekend in nature begins to fade as Sunday night melancholy kicks in. I decide to spend 6.77$ to rent Aftersun from TIFF’s digital offerings because I need to cry (I cried).
- $6.77 = Aftersun rental for the purposes of emotional exorcism
Daily Total = $16.77
Monday
I meet my Dad during my break to treat him to lunch for his birthday. We go to this breakfast spot downtown most Mondays at lunch to eat (randomly incredible) freezer-based homefries and complain about our respective university admin jobs because I am apparently becoming my father. He is 59 now.
- $27.64 = two plates of eggs, breakfast potatoes and toast + a serving each of suspiciously desaturated fruit
Daily Total = $27.64
Tuesday
After work I battle the elements to the SAQ and grab a cheap bottle of La Vieille Ferme to bring over to my friend Chloe’s place in the Plateau for dinner.
Chloe whips Maya and I up a veggie lasagna and we talk about work, the men we’ve dated in Liberal Arts programs, and Emily in Paris. I think Chloe should be put in charge of something important. She is very accomplished academically while remaining grounded and generous socially (a rare combination), and she’s articulate in a way that makes me feel, in comparison, like a shrieking baby clawing at the air in desperate search of a language I do not yet possess to express myself in the world.
The distance between the Plateau and my apartment in Verdun feels truly insurmountable after pounding back wine and carbs for several hours, so I split an uber home with Maya.
- $13.95 = La Vieille Ferme (a wine that’s actually as good as it is cheap imo)
- $12.35 = uber ride
Daily Total = $26.30
Wednesday
In the name of Responsible Budgetting (sexless), I’ve decided I’m allowed to luxuriate in one overpriced caffeinated beverage a week. I buy a vanilla matcha latte at a nearby café on my lunch break and read there, partially to make sure that I still can after staring at my empty inbox all morning.
- 8.26$ = matcha latte (criminal, matcha is barely even good, I am upset, but stoically I accept what I cannot change)
On Wednesday evenings I go over to my parents’ for dinner before walking to an art class I’ve started going to – a Chirstmas gift from my parents, and at a studio I’ve been going to since I was a kid. In the art classes I’ve taken in the past, I’ve felt a strong need to be either the most talented or at the very least the youngest and thus hallowed by my vitality, making me an inherent person of interest amongst the other (usually geriatric) students. In this class I am neither. A guy next to me introduces himself as a recent McGill grad and my instant inclination to recognize him as a peer is violently slashed by the realization that I’m more than two years out of my undergrad now.
I decide to sleep at my parents’ house after class to inject novelty into my weekly routine and also because I want to be babied. I stop by the pharmacy on my walk home to pick up the toiletries I don’t have with me. Before bed I also notice that my monthly membership fee at a fitness studio has been slurped out of my account. Unfortunately exercise has been gamechanging for my mental sanity. I also experience cosmic longing for a fat ass. I will, genetically speaking, never be capable of developing one. Nonetheless, I persist.
- $35.30 = travel-sized face cleanser and moisturizer, makeup wipes, a toothbrush and eyeliner
- $21.56 = average weekly cost of my gym membership ($86.24 total per month)
Daily total = $56.86
Thursday
I’ve been diligently packing my lunch all week so I manage to not spend any money until 5:30PM, when I see a bag on Facebook Marketplace. It’s two dollars, and a ten minute walk from my apartment. I’m frothing at the mouth. By the time I’m at the seller’s front door I don’t even know if it’s actually nice anymore. I am simply riding the high of buying something for two dollars. A mid-thirties couple greets me at the door and the man helps me carry the shopping bags of shit I am now wielding from my sleepover last night. The bag is kind of weird honestly but I’m inside their place now and his girlfriend is whipping out more bags to show me. I respectfully decline the others and give her my two dollars and leave with my weird bag. In a way, the couple is like family to me now.
Because life is about slowly accruing random monthly fees, I have to stop by the Jean Coutu on my walk home to recharge my subway card.
- $2 = bag (it might be growing on me?)
- $23.50 = average weekly cost of my Opus card ($94 per month)
Daily total = $25.30
Friday
On Fridays I work from home, which is particularly a blessing today, a day that has ROCKED the nation of Quebec, Canada, as temperatures drop to the lowest levels Montreal has seen in fourteen years. The fact of it being borderline lethal to exit my home makes it very easy to save money. Friday is Date Night though (sorry), so my boyfriend and I traipse out into the absolutely unforgiving cold for our reservation at a South Indian restaurant that he loves (he pays – thanks king!).
On our way back to the subway I feel like I am experiencing permanent brain damage from the bone-chilling wind so we seek temporary refuge in a Pharmaprix. I enter this Pharmaprix with only the intention of taking a moment to warm my throbbing skull, but the universe – God maybe? – has other plans for me. I leave with two packs of tampons, Lifesaver gummies, an essie nailpolish, and 78% dark chocolate.
- $36.53 = my little treats
Daily Total = $36.53
Weekly Roundup
Total weekly spendings = $214.37
Aside from my brief foray into Quebec ski culture, and not including bigger monthly expenses like rent and groceries, this was a fairly average week of spending for me. In a city like Montreal that has not yet slipped into the realm of prohibitively expensive, living on a 40k budget has not awarded me glamour but by God I am Getting By. I’m, dare I say, even a little bit touched by how my purchases reflect the fabric of my day-to-day: watching sad movies, sharing meals with loved ones, getting seduced by random items at the pharmacy, and enjoying a hobby here and there. I can’t complain (but I have, and likely will again)!
Tracking my spending this week has ultimately taught me that sometimes it is life affirming to buy a matcha latte that isn’t very good. It’s not really about the matcha after all, but rather what the act of buying the matcha represents – the promise of maybe having a little fun in a world in which you are 25 and constantly being humbled by the sheer irrelevance of your masters degree in the workplace.
You can find Gaby Dupuis on Instagram.
Pink Asparagus 