What Are You Doing With Your Stimulus Payment?

I'm one of the luckiest ones: My "last two digits of your S.S. number" happen to be rather low, so I already got my payment from the IRS. The question now is: What will I do with it?

Nothing yet. At this moment it is sitting in my savings account, to be used when needed. But I have already made a couple of decisions about how I will and won't use it:

• I do not intend to use it to buy stuff from China, or any other foreign country. If I'm going to stimulate the American economy, it would seem reasonable to spend the money on American goods and services.
• I do not intend to just "blow it on something," regardless of where it was produced. It may end up being invested, used for an unanticipated need, or put toward something I deem important; but I don't intend to just spend it, because I have it.
• I will probably do something nice (and relatively inexpensive) for my family soon, like go out to eat when we normally would not plan to do so.

But truth be told, it may just get spent on car insurance and gasoline. [Note: Just jumped to $3.89 a dollar for unleaded—outrageous!]