Frugal, starting now
Posted
Dec 03 2007, 11:28 AM
by
Donna Freedman
A reader who calls herself “Tightwad_Amy” always has been kind of frugal. But recent upheavals in her personal life forced her to really live up to her sobriquet.
First, Amy lost “a great job.” Then her husband quit his job. Then her husband left her.
“I’ve really had to cut expenses,” Amy wrote on the Smart Spending message board.
She started a thread called “I wish I had been doing this all along” to chronicle her cutbacks. One of them, flushing the toilet only once a day, struck me as excessive -- but not as excessive as some extreme savings measures.
Some of her other cutbacks are bringing more quantifiable savings: brown-bag lunches, no more soda or bottled water, using public transit to get to her new job.
Fact is, she has to take the bus -- her husband took their car when he left. Yet “riding the bus is another thing I wish I’d been doing all along,” Amy writes. At $80 a month, bus fares are a steal compared with a $400 car payment plus another $220 for gas and insurance.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda
“I wish I had been doing this all along” is a common refrain among those who have changed their spending habits. They can’t believe they used to spend $200 a month on lunches out, let alone thousands of dollars on designer purses and footwear.
They wish they’d been smarter. They wish they’d deferred gratification. They wish they’d held on to even a fraction of the funds they frittered.
Quick reality check: You can’t change the past, and you can’t get that money back. But you can change the present and, in doing so, change the future. You can change the way you handle money now.
It doesn’t matter when you start. It matters that you start.
Working vs. wishing
Let me backtrack: To some extent it does matter when you start. For example, someone who contributes to a retirement plan beginning in her 20s will be better off than someone who’s just getting around to it in her 40s.
But that someone in her 40s has to start somewhere. Sitting around saying, “I wish...” won’t get her very far.
Not that Amy is just wishing. (Or that she’s in her 40s, for that matter. I have no idea how old she is.) She’s cutting her budget, weighing available resources, and seeking out tips and support on the message board.
An excellent piece of advice came from reader “back2basix," who weighed in thusly: “Ah, the ‘I wish’ mode! Me too, except I’m trying to change that into (a) ‘Finally, where I need to be’ mode of thinking.”
That’s both practical and positive. What you used to do doesn’t matter, except as an object lesson against which to weigh your current behavior.
If there's one piece of advice I could give, it would be this: Don’t impose absolute penury on yourself as a desperate attempt to make up for perceived financial sins of the past. That way “frugal burnout” lies.
Instead, consider that “where I need to be” mode as the framework for living both frugally and fully.
Oh, and feel free to flush more than once a day.
