Frugality = Bang for the Buck!

What Does ‘Frugality’ Mean?
Frugality is like any value that we have in life.
The more we lean into it and trust it, the more value it brings to us.
That being said, the author underlines the idea of what frugality is;
key lessons taken from The Wisdom of Frugality is that people often mean different things when they use the word “frugality,” the author defines what the word means to him.
 
So, let’s dig in
Frugality = Bang for the Buck by Trent Hamm:

When I say “frugality,” I simply mean a conscious effort to get the most value I can whenever I’m spending some of my resources. Usually, when I say “resources,” I mean dollars and cents, but not always (and I’ll get back to that in a little bit). Whenever I spend a dollar, it is important to me to get the most value I can for that dollar.
At first glance, one might think that would mean that I’m super price sensitive about everything and will always buy the lowest priced option, but that often ends up not being the case.

Why? To me, part of “value” means doing the job well, not just doing the job minimally.
I’ll use my favorite example of trash bags to make this clear. Many years ago, when I first started diving into frugality, I went the “cheap” route on virtually everything I could, and one of those things was trash bags.
Now, for most of the store brand and generic items I purchased, the item did exactly what was intended and I was very happy with that purchase. I was thrilled with store brand dish soap and store brand flour and store brand breakfast cereal and so on, as almost all of them were indistinguishable from the name brand for our purposes. Those were frugal purchases – I was getting the most “bang for the buck” for my dollar from those purchases because they worked just as well as more expensive name brand options for my needs.

With trash bags… that wasn’t the case.
I found that I could only fill them up halfway, which meant that I was investing more time taking the trash out. Even worse, about one in 30 or so of the bags would split all over the kitchen floor, creating a big cleanup hassle that I had to deal with. These bags cost about $0.05 each, whereas the brand I was using before cost about $0.20 each, but I could fit twice as much in the more expensive bags and I never had blowouts.

In other words, there was a big extra hidden cost in the cheap bags.
I was taking out the trash twice as often, which was eating up a minute or two here and a minute or two there, and about once a month there would be a huge mess in the kitchen that would take extra time to clean up. The generic bags were adding a time cost compared to the better bags. So, while I might be able to buy a box of 100 cheap trash bags for $5 versus 100 good bags for $20, the truth is that I was using the cheap bags twice as often, so the real match was buying two boxes of those cheap bags, which cost me $10, and then watching lots of minutes here and minutes there come and go with the occasional blowout in the kitchen. All of that lost time didn’t add up to $10 in savings to me, so I switched away from the generics.

My point is this: There are more costs to the things you buy than just the initial dollars and cents. Using things costs time and energy, too. If you’re saving money on something that’s going to end up requiring additional time and energy to use, you need to make sure that the saved money is worth the extra time and energy.
Continue reading: What Does 'Frugality' Mean? By Trent Hamm via TSD

Frugality is like any value that we have in life.
The more we lean into it and trust it, the more value it brings to us.
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Trent Hamm, Author at The Simple Dollar

Trent Hamm started The Simple Dollar in 2006 after going through a complete financial meltdown. Trent decided to throw himself head first into fixing his financial situation and getting out of debt. Within eight months, he was able to pay off all of his credit card debt as well as his vehicle, and he also established an emergency fund.