SimpleBlob's Life

Reddit, Being Frugal.

I've said it before on /r/Frugal and I'll say it again.

Being frugal is not about saving money. Not one bit. Being frugal is about saving TIME.

HOWEVER... when you think on the relation of time vs. money... you need to factor in something that many people leave out... how much TIME did it take you to EARN the money? You need to convert costs to time, not dollars. The oil change may cost you 35 dollars... but if it takes two hours to earn that money back then you may be losing in the long run.

We are frugal not because we want to save money. Money is essentially an infinite resource. If we spend what we have we can always make more. The catch is that we have to spend time to make money. Time is a very, very finite resource. Most of us will only get about 70 years worth, and if you're old enough to be living the frugal life you've probably already spent 20 or 30 years of it.

We are frugal because we want to avoid spending money and essentially eliminate the need to make more of it.

If you're frugal because you want to spend all of your time saving money so you can stockpile it then I think you have the wrong idea. I also think you have the wrong idea if you're being frugal so that you can build up enough money to buy "things". Or, maybe you want to retire young but you don't wanna look back and think that you wasted the best years of your life earning money so you can spend the most increasingly difficult years of your life saving money to leave behind. I certainly hope you aren't visiting /r/Frugal on a regular basis because you want to save up enough money to buy a great big house so you can spend time making money to fill it with more "things".

You can get money back. You can't get time back. But being frugal is about not being wasteful with money so that you don't have to spend time.

If you could knock a little something into the heads of young liberals, what would it be?

I'd like to get them to think in terms of incentives and empirical evidence, and not in terms of goals and hopes. Over the years, I've reached the point where I can hardly bear to read the preamble of proposed legislation. I don't care what you think this thing is going to do. What I care about is: What are you rewarding, and what are you punishing? Because you're going to get more of what you're rewarding and less of what you're punishing. -- Thomas Sowell