My Friends are Costing Me Money!

One of the things I missed the most when we were traveling was my friends.  I felt so out of the loop, I missed hanging out with people, and I missed the shared experiences of working or volunteering with people on projects.  Keeping in touch by email or phone was OK but not the same.
Now that I have been back for a couple of weeks, I have managed to catch up with many friends but I have also noticed that being social costs money!  (I guess I didn't appreciate all of the savings of not going around with friends while we were in Atlanta...).  Within the last couple of weeks I have...

• Had a friend who ended up in the hospital (bought card and flowers)
• Had a friend whose child called to remind me it was her birthday (bought a birthday cake).  Note: I started providing birthday cakes to my friend's children some years ago.  They are from Iraq and had never seen a birthday cake before so after the first cake, it became a tradition for me to bring a cake for all four of her kid's birthdays since she is a widowed mom and her family cannot afford to help her much.
• Met up with a group of friends at the mall (I didn't buy anything while we were shopping but did end up buying a drink at Starbucks and lunch at a restaurant).
• Another friend came to me asking if I could buy a dozen tamales from her friend who was struggling to pay her rent since she had lost her job (bought tamales).
• Have met three other friends at Starbucks over the past couple of weeks (bought three Starbucks drinks for me and one for a friend).
• Went to an early morning meeting for a friend who would be out of town and needed someone to run the meeting for her (bought Starbucks again...out of habit).

In the next couple of weeks I will be:

• Meeting up with my sister and her kids (this will include gas money for the six hour drive and paying for dinner for everyone, another old habit from when I used to actually have money).
• Turning down a trip to the beach with friends who will be going next weekend (it would be fun but again, I am saving my money for our trip to Japan and this would definitely cost me more money)
• Debating about an invitation to a fundraiser event in Seattle (I used to be a good one to invite to fundraisers because I like helping out where I can, unfortunately, attending these events is expensive!).

So, on the one hand, I love hanging out with friends but the financial costs are pretty high.  Fortunately almost everyone I know has had to cut back their spending so our day long shopping sprees are probably history (thank goodness!) but it just never dawned on me that there is a cost associated just by being social.  Yikes.