This is the second of my weekly Frugal Friday series. Since starting this blog I’ve had a strong need to focus on at least one consciously frugal thing each week. This past week I went shopping at Sam’s Club and bought a few food safe storage containers and a 25-pound bag of white rice. The rice was $12, normally I buy the 3 pound bag from Aldi, but this worked out to roughly half the price, only 48 cents per pound. I didn’t have space currently in my pantry to fit the contents of a 50 pound bag.

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk about what Frugality means to me when I talk about it. The dictionary defines frugal as: characterized by or reflecting thrift and efficiency in the use of resources. Though many interpret this as cheap or poor.

I have a saying, and I can’t remember if I took it from Rich Dad Poor Dad (Affiliate Link) or if I made it up after reading it, but I tell my kids: Rich and Poor are how you think. Wealth and Poverty are haves and have nots.

I think many people feel that they are being cheap when they should re-frame it as frugality. Cheap is buying a $20 hair trimmer for the 3rd year in a row that keeps breaking; frugality is buying a well made long lasting heirloom quality hair trimmer on eBay or Facebook at a significant discount.

We live in a society obsessed with possessing the newest thing as quickly as possible while utilizing credit that has become so easy to access. Electronic payments allow money to slip away with no tangible loss that was felt when writing a check or handing out cash. It’s hard on the mind to hold onto such intangible objects.

So what do we do to fix this? To start find 1 thing each week that you can do to save money. 1 less visit to Starbucks. Take that $5, $10, w/e that you didn’t spend and invest it into something, anything. Use Robinhood, or Acorns, or Vanguard anything that gets that money working for you, instead of slipping away.

Leave a comment on what you did that was frugal this week!

~~Miniwing~~
Parent, Investor, Stoic