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“I am frugal to a flaw, and it has made my life 100x easier.”
I wrote that revelation more than a decade ago, but it still rings true today. Life is easier when lived frugally. Importantly, the frugal life is attainable while finding joy and living out your dreams if you just follow a few simple steps in your everyday life.
1. Make spending money difficult.
In James Clear’s bestseller, Atomic Habits, one of the keys to forming a habit is to make it easy. To stop a habit, do the opposite: Make it difficult.
For someone on a diet, “make it difficult” might mean not keeping ice cream in the house. If they have to walk to the store to buy ice cream each time they want ice cream, they may decide that ice cream just is not worth it some of the time. (I almost always find ice cream worth the walk, but back to frugality.)
Each day a new technological advancement makes it easier for you to spend money. Apple Pay, Zelle, Venmo, and other P2P payment methods make it easy to spend money constantly. You spend money without even thinking about it, and without pulling out a card or cash or anything else that symbolizes money transfer exclusively. Instead, you just use your phone, the everything-device that is always glued to you.
My suggestion? Do not use any mobile pay apps. The extra step in spending money, the extra “friction” as those in my career field might say, will prevent many purchases. If a purchase is worth it, you can take out your card, get cash to pay back your friend, or do the math to split the bill with your friends.
I have never used a mobile pay app, and Patrick only has Venmo and PayPal for business transactions. If you must have a P2P payment method, limit it to business expenses and make it more difficult to access: You do not need to download the PayPal app. You can just use it from your computer. The more steps you add in the process, the more intentional you force your decisions to be.
Want to take this a step further? Before you go somewhere for the day, consider how much money you plan to spend and take that money out in cash. Leave any other source of money at home, except for a card in case of emergency that you commit to only use in case of a true emergency. If it should be a no-spend day, do not bring any money!
2. Be lazy.
In reality, this should say, be lazy, but not the laziest due to all the modern conveniences that exist. So the real rules for step #2 are more like:
Set rules that you must be active when buying something.
Be lazy.
For example, if you want to get takeout for dinner, you have to go retrieve it from the restaurant. Either you get that 10 minute walk in to pick up the food, or you do not get takeout. For this rule, you have two options:
Get exercise by walking to pick up takeout.
Be lazy, and spend no money.
The naturally frugal cannot fathom the separate service fee, delivery fee, and tip that go along with something like Doordash. Just say no to your meal costing 50% more with all the extra fees, and save on takeout costs when you would rather just pop popcorn and sit on the couch instead of retrieving pizza in the rain. We often purchase something like takeout for ease rather than because we are looking forward to enjoying it. Requiring the walk will let you know when you really want that takeout because it will be worth the walk when you do!
Another common example is online spending. Do not save your credit card information or address in your profile for any online spending platforms. If you are tempted to buy something online, you need to go get your credit card, log in, enter all the information and your address, and then buy it. Your online spending options would be:
Stand up and acquire my credit card, log in, enter credit card information, enter my address, choose anything else the online platform makes you select (for example, shipping choices), and buy.
Be lazy, and spend no money.
This practice can also eliminate the potential of becoming the main character in an article about a two-year-old purchasing 250 chocolate chip cookies using the household Amazon Alexa. If you are not logged into your Amazon account, you can just laugh about how much your child loves chocolate chip cookies. Take it from a real Alexa (yup, that’s my full name), you should sign out of your accounts.
3. Buy in the present.
Only buy items if you can pay for them in full upon purchase, with the exception of extremely large purchases. While it makes sense to buy your $500,000 home in monthly installments over the course of many years, most items are not homes. Buying a car over time can also work if it is a necessity and you are young. If your car is more of a luxury item like mine, I suggest waiting until you can pay for it in cash (which I actually did!).
Do not buy a shirt in four payments of $15 rather than just paying $60. If you cannot pay for that shirt all at once, maybe you should not spend that $60 at all. If it is the best shirt you ever saw in your life, save up and buy it next month.
Where to draw the line can vary: I cannot tell you whether your dirtbike, car, truck, yacht, or motorhome should be a one-time purchase or require multiple payments to pay the full amount. However, the higher you place the bar for allowing yourself to pay over time, the more stable your financial situation will be. In this household, our home is the only thing we pay over time, and that is largely due to our 2.75% interest rate.
4. Value your time.
As someone who loves efficiency, there are two activities that crush my soul as the ultimate time-depleting black holes. Coincidentally, both also have a habit of triggering increased spending:
Working late or longer than you should be working per your contract.
Shopping.
If you value your time, you do not work late unless you receive additional pay or benefits. If you work extra hours for no compensation, you are effectively admitting that your time is worth nothing. You are taking time away from the recovery your brain and body need to wake up with full energy the following day. You are also taking time away from earning money in other ways, if you want to do that.
Not only are you devaluing your work unintentionally, working late also tends to lead to poor spontaneous purchases. Here are two scenarios to show why:
Scenario 1: I left my job on time and went straight to the gym to workout after work. I came back, showered, and had dinner with my partner. We watched something on Netflix, then read for a bit before going to sleep. I slept for a full eight hours and awoke feeling refreshed. After some morning stretches, I made oatmeal, and went to work again.
Scenario 2: I left my job an hour late, but I really did not want to skip the gym since I worked late and skipped it yesterday. After a quick workout, I stopped by and picked up my partner’s favorite dessert because I knew he would be disappointed that I did not join him for dinner. I showered, ate some leftovers, and joined my partner for something on Netflix. My work phone went off, so I checked my email. Two hours later, I realized how late it was and decided to go to sleep without winding down first. I could not sleep for some time and woke up feeling exhausted. I went to the local coffee shop to buy coffee and decided to just buy a muffin there too to save time before going to work again.
Working late or early or too much leads to making impulsive purchases to save time. The time is missing because of the long work hours. If you work extra hours, you are probably making purchases to create efficiencies that would be unnecessary if you just worked less.
The second time-depleting black hole is shopping. It is also a direct money-depleting hole. If you are someone that goes to Target to buy new pillow cases and ends up with a $200 bill and no pillow cases, stop going to Target. Target has a website! You can go to it, select the pillow cases you want, purchase them, save the time it takes to get to Target, and save the money you would spend at Target. If you cannot see the displays at each aisle, they cannot tempt you.
Avoiding shopping is a sliding scale, similar to when to pay in full versus in installments, but the fewer places you shop in real life, the less money you will spend. Here is my personal philosophy: Do not go shopping in real life other than food, medicine, or the rare household emergency where something is truly broken. If you are only going to grocery stores regularly and the hardware store once a year, you are much less likely to make impulsive purchases. Does this sound impossible? I have not been to a clothing store since 2019. I do not remember the last time I was in a Target. My shopping experiences consist of Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, CVS, and Costco. It is completely possible to not visit the stores that may trigger unnecessary purchases.
5. Buy what you want: Commit to your dream purchase.
If you could have just one thing that you want this year, what would it be? Identify the spending that would give you the most joy. Maybe it is a two-week trip to Europe or a new truck.
These types of purchases often feel impossible because they are so large, but they give us the most joy. They are the type of purchases that allow us to make memories that keep providing joy throughout our lives, as Bill Perkins describes in Die With Zero. But when they are so expensive, how do we afford them?
Let’s say your joyous purchase would be a two-week trip to Greece for your fifth anniversary in a year. Each time you encounter the purchase of a want as opposed to a need, decide whether you want that want more than that trip. If the answer is no, deposit the amount of money you would have spent on the fleeting want into a high-yield savings account dedicated to saving for that Greece trip. When you want a muffin at Dunkin Donuts but decide to wait and buy a muffin while walking along the Mediterranean Sea, deposit $3. When ordering takeout sounds so much easier than cooking dinner after a busy day, deposit the $25 you did not spend on The Cheesecake Factory. It will likely pay for two waterfront dinners. When those heels are so cute but you already own the hiking boots you need to conquer the Samaria Gorge, deposit $75.
Over time, you accumulate enough money to make that happiness spending goal a reality. In the interim, your biggest happiness spending goal is the best motivation to live more frugally. Teach yourself delayed gratification by saving for something better than all the frivolous purchases in your life. You will live a frugal and happier life.
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