Finances & Money • Frugality

Frugality is a waste of time

I received a comment this morning on our Frugal Lunch post that made me very angry. First, the commenter used the F-word. That’s a no-no. Read my Commenting Policy. I tagged him/her as spam.

I’ve already responded directly to the commenter, but I wanted to respond to the commenter’s message as a post for all of you to read. Here is what the commenter said (edited):

I guess if you made enough money you wouldn’t give a (edited) what bread, peanut butter, or tuna costs.

Here’s a thought, instead of trying to find ways to save .20 on bread, or eating food that tastes like dog food, find a better day job? More school? Start a company?

I didn’t mean to switch the rotation of your earth’s orbit, but if you put 1/2 of the amount of time into finding ways to make money then you did into finding bottled water, cheap tuna, or peanut butter, you might be on to something.

We’re not poor, but we’re not rich. We make a lot of money compared to our relatives, but we also live in an expensive area (Washington, D.C. area) . There’s a reason we were able to pay down $35,000 in car debt in 2.5 years, but I want to bring this discussion above our situation. I can see why people who read frugality articles often wonder what is the point of trying to save pennies.

But pennies add up into dollars. And in the case of Frugal Lunch, they add up to $988, and that’s a VERY conservative estimate of the costs of eating out for lunch. I could easily revise the dining-out costs to be $7.50 per day ($1378/year savings), all the way up to $12-14 per day($2548-$3068/year), based on 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year. I understand we take vacations and sometimes work from home, so maybe knock 2-4 weeks off those totals. You’ll still end up with big numbers.

I’m going to wrap this up now, and request your comments. But I want to leave with one piece of advice:

Rich people stay rich by being wise, not wasteful, with their money