The Problem With Most Frugality Tips
We should all be more frugal. Or so we are told. People have written entire books about it.
If we’re to believe what those books say, it is possible to reduce our spending by ninety percent, pretty much instantly, by following their wonderful tips. The tips are easy; the tips are fun. And the tips are so clever that you need to buy that person’s book or you’ll never figure out what those tips might be. If we read the right books, we’ll know all about saving money or our purchases, and we’ll be able to implement them right away.
So if we haven’t implemented all these tips, something must be wrong with us, isn’t that so?
Not so fast. Not. So. Fast.
Maybe we’re not all lazy, spendthrift slobs.
Maybe this frugality thing has some hidden catches.
Is it impossible to save money? No, it’s not. Don’t get discouraged. I will not leave you in a pit of despair. But to know what works, we should also examine what doesn’t work, and why it doesn’t work.
Most frugality tips are fraught with a massive, unacknowledged, problem. Most frugality tips take no account of the costs associated with being frugal.
Costs? What costs, you ask? After all, these tips are all about saving us money.
Yes, they save us money. But they cost us in other ways. Ways in which we may already be running on empty and not be able to cough up.
Most often, frugality measures cost us time.
Don’t buy greeting cards, make your own. Don’t buy laundry detergent, make your own. Don’t spend money on pottery lessons for your kids, learn it yourself from YouTube and then teach them. Don’t buy clothes, make your own. Ok, I’m getting a bit carried away here. Most of us will at least realize that sewing our own clothes is, for most people, not a great use of time.
But what about the idea of “don’t buy takeout meals, make your own!”. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Making your own meals is likely to be much cheaper than buying takeout. Please don’t think I am denying that. But also please note that if someone is buying takeout rather than cooking, it might not be due to them being lazy. Cooking is a huge time drain. While maybe some of us just have a lot going on. Things like life in general, or parents with health crises, or kids with health crises. We simply don’t know.
Frugality measures often cost us energy.
It doesn’t stop there. Our days may be full, but even if they’re not, our energy levels may be at empty. Work is stressful, relationships are stressful. Parenting is stressful, housework is stressful. We may have a special needs kid or a difficult relative. It never ends.
The people who cook all their meals from scratch and make their own greeting cards make it look like these activities make no dent at all in our energy. Unless you’re someone who would do such activities for fun, that is simply not true. And just try shopping with coupons, comparing prices of every single item, and scouring aisle after aisle of the grocery store for bargains. I challenge you to feel like that costs you zero in terms of energy.
Frugality measures often cost us our sanity.
What materials are needed for making your own greeting cards? Do you have colored paper, markers, glue, glitter, and stickers, all sitting ready for such a project? Did you buy them at the dollar store to save some more money? Can you find all those items at the moment that you need them?
Do you always have the right ingredients on hand for the recipe you were planning to make? Is your meal plan and shopping list up to date so that you can pull off this week’s meals without a hitch? Do you have substitutions in mind if a particular ingredient is not in stock at the store? Do you have food in mind to feed your family with if they were to be more hungry than usual? Or if someone in the family is unwell and needs a trip to the doctor and suddenly there’s no time to cook? Or if your family members turn up their noses at what you cooked and raid the fridge and use up the food for tomorrow’s dinner before you notice what they’re doing?
And we wonder why we feel overwhelmed. I wonder if there’s any professional training in project management out there that even comes close to realistically training anyone to corral all these details in a sensible fashion. Oh, sure, there are books about meal planning and housework. (Assuming we have time to read them). But that just proves my point. There are books written about these things because these tasks are complicated.
The underlying assumption in most frugality advice is that time, energy, and sanity, are things we have an infinite supply of.
And oh, the guilt if we find ourselves running out of this time, energy, and sanity. Or at least, I end up with guilt. All these frugality messages do not serve to help us with this guilt, not at all.
So if there’s one takeaway message from what I’m telling you today: If there’s frugality advice you haven’t implemented yet, don’t beat yourself up, you’ve probably run out of either time, energy, or sanity, or all of those things.
But we still want to get better at saving money, right? Do I have anything that might help? Yes, hang with me here.
Of course, those of us who don’t have a houseful of staff, or an assistant at work, or a stay-at-home family member who believes that their life’s work is going round picking up the pieces, will find ourselves hitting a wall and potentially spending money in order to survive the day somehow. (Oh, wait, those assistants cost money too. Why am I going around in circles talking about this? Because these things are circular, and crazy-making, by their very nature.)
So what to do? We still don’t want to be throwing our money away. We totally understand that we don’t need a five-hundred dollar pair of shoes or the latest designer handbag, so I won’t insult you with advice around that. Does that leave anything we can do that can help us reduce our spending?
There is.
It’s called procrastination. A special kind of procrastination specifically applied to shopping. The method is: If you can talk yourself out of buying the item, don’t buy it. At least for now.
Do I need another shirt right now? I actually don’t. It would take me another few years to wear out the clothes that are hanging up in my wardrobe. Time, energy, and money, to be spent on deciding whether to buy a shirt? Not in play, because I’m not buying clothes. I’ve had people in the past tell me that I have very few clothes. You know what happened after those comments? After an entire year of not buying clothes, plus getting rid of many items, I still have more than I manage to wear before I do my laundry.
Do my kids need to attend a dance class? Maybe they should. Or maybe, if they already go to a music class, or an art class, or play a sport, this class can wait another year.
Should I buy the bulk pack of snacks that are on sale? In my family, no, because as soon as there is a large quantity of any food in the pantry, my kids decide that they don’t like that food after all. In the same vein, I don’t explore the snack aisle in the grocery store trying to find the best value snacks. We buy things we already know we will eat, and not huge amounts of them either. If the kids run out of chips and have to eat carrots for snacks, they will survive. Your pantry might not contain all the things your family wants. But does it contain enough actual calories to get them through today? If so, you’re doing okay.
Does my kid need another noisy plastic toy? No, they never do, and you don’t need yet another piece of clutter for your floor. Has your kid asked for a new toy? At the very least, one can quietly wait and see if they ever mention it again.
How much of your stuff do you actually use? How much of your stuff actually just gets in the way of you finding the stuff that you need right at that moment? If you avoid buying things, that in itself won’t give you the cheapest items around. What it will give you is fewer items in general. Fewer items you have spent your time and energy on. Fewer items to organize, keep track of, and repair. Fewer items to declutter down the track. And incidentally, less money spent overall.
If you really do this seriously, you will also gain information regarding a very important question: Do you use shopping to self-soothe? There’s nothing better for figuring out the answer to that question than refraining from buying things and watching the discomfort mount within ourselves. Okay, that problem won’t be solved overnight (and is a whole other topic), but the way to start working on that is to notice it happening!
Related questions that can come up include: Do you buy things “just in case”? Do you overestimate how much of a grocery item you will use? Do you buy items that you could borrow or rent instead? Again, you can start on answering these questions by watching yourself in action. Or more to the point, by refraining from actions like buying a certain thing, and observing what happens.
It might feel threatening. But it’s not as terrible as it seems. There’s a big difference between ending up with a weird mishmash of food for a meal and having no food in the house. There’s a big difference between not having the perfect fashionable outfit and having literally nothing to put on to stay warm. There might be frustration, but you don’t need to worry that your procrastination in buying things will end in disaster. (By all means, if you want to go over the top with how much bottled water you’re storing for the next tornado, do it).
Is it possible you’ll still need to buy that item someday? Perhaps. But if you don’t need to buy it right now, that’s all you need to know for now.
Making your own items instead of buying them, or shopping around to buy the cheapest version, takes time and energy. But what also takes time and energy and sanity and results in money spent is just – shopping in general. Whatever ways we can avoid that in the first place, it can save us not only time and energy and sanity, but – money. All the things we want to save. All by procrastinating on that particular activity.
