Early this morning I was scrounging around my dresser in the dark trying to find a pair of gym shorts without waking my wife. After a few minutes of fruitless searching and a little grumbling, I decided to just do my workout in a pair of boxers. This got me thinking, I can’t remember the last time I bought gym shorts, and two pairs probably isn’t enough.
I can’t tell you why I never bought more gym shorts. I wear them almost every morning to work out, and to do summer yard work. The probability of both pairs being dirty at the same time is very high. But they’re not a priority for me, and I assume they cost more than $10, so it just never occurred to me to buy more.
As I did my workout this morning, I started to list out some of the frugal habits I still maintain, such as rarely updating my wardrobe, and could probably stop. This isn’t to say I’m inviting lifestyle creep. I’ve purposely allowed some lifestyle creep in certain areas of my life (ie, landscapers to cut the grass, cleaners to deep clean the house 2x/month). But, well…you’ll see.
Tracking the cost of home heating oil
When we first bought our house, we spent everything we had just getting the house. We knew we could afford the monthly bills, but oil was at a ten year high and the thought of buying more than one $740 tank of oil in a year was terrifying. With each delivery I would track what we spent in total, what we paid per gallon, and how long each tank lasted. Given that we rarely changed the program on the thermostat, I could forecast a roundabout time that we would run out of oil given our prior usage and the upcoming weather.
Although I’ve stopped trying to forecast when we’ll need oil, I still track what we paid and when. The price of oil has dropped significantly since that first year, and we usually pay a little over $300/tank of oil. At this point in my life, ruthlessly tracking a $300 necessary expense I make at most 3x/year is kind of a waste of energy. I feel like this is the year I may be able to finally let this one go.*
*Over the course of writing this article the cost of home heating oil nearly doubled thanks to a number of factors including but not limited to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this one instance, for the first time ever I decided to only buy enough oil to get us through to warmer weather and hopefully lower prices instead of filling my tank completely.
Being cheap about my clothes
I’ve worked from home for six years, but I still have a closet full of dress shirts and pants that (thankfully) still fit. I have fancy shoes for all occasions, sneakers, sandals, and work boots. I have a dresser full of t-shirts, polos, sweaters, and shorts, a myriad of socks and boxers, jeans, flannel pants, and the aforementioned gym shorts. The thing is that the majority of them are at least five years old if not more.
Clothes just aren’t a priority for me. I own clothes that are in style, comfortable and fit me well, so I see no need to buy more. I regularly replace jeans, boxers, socks and t-shirts that wear out or get ruined, but I tend to do that at Costco, Amazon or Old Navy.
Finding myself without a clean pair of gym shorts just reminds me that I can probably spend a few dollars to buy another two pairs so I don’t have to work out in my boxers again.
Running low on food
First I should say that we eat a lot of fresh food in our house, so buying it in bulk just isn’t possible. Either you eat it, or you throw it out when it goes bad. So we tend to cut things pretty close with things like dairy and produce. And with three hungry kids, it’s easy to run out.
Despite having ample storage and five people eating the food, we still stick pretty closely to a budget and rarely stray. This means more trips to the grocery store than we’d like.
We’re starting to get better about this, especially with foods we can freeze, canned goods, and other foods that last a long time (like rice). And having three kids means we need to have a lot of snacks around, so our pantry is now packed with those. If I get a chance to rebuild my garden next spring, hopefully this becomes a non-issue.
Always looking for the slightly cheaper option
There’s a lot to be said for getting the best value out of the money you spend on a product. And I have always been a champion of this. When the situation calls for it, I’m still a value guy at heart and that will never change. But gone are the days of looking at the menu and getting the slightly cheaper entrée or skipping an appetizer because it will save $10. I stopped drinking Evan Williams because it was $12 cheaper than Maker’s Mark (I should probably stop drinking any brand for a while). I don’t shop around for gas.
This won’t change my view on name brands, coupon codes, ebay, or Amazon Warehouse items, though. If I want to own a book, I’m going for the cheapest option. I don’t buy anything online without trying to find a discount. My t-shirts still come from Old Navy. If an “out of box” item is significantly cheaper than its brand new counterpart, I’m rolling the dice. And when it comes to things like my smart home hobby, I can tell you for a fact things like this $23 four pack of Govee smart plugs work just as well as this single $24 Amazon smart plug.
Tracking how long it takes to run out of an item
This started as an exercise in optimization. I would write the date we opened a package on the package. For instance, we buy the giant Costco size double roll of garbage bags, and I reflexively write the date on the package to see how long it takes us to use the whole package. I’ve done this with toilet paper, paper towels, and other bulk household staples. Originally I thought it would help me better predict when we were going to run out of them and budget accordingly. At this point in my life, this just isn’t relevant anymore. For one, we need these staples. I’m not going to go without garbage bags or toilet paper, and the price doesn’t violently fluctuate like oil. Plus we’re only buying them every few months, and with all the other groceries we need to support a family of five it’s not changing anything if I can predict that in three months I’ll spend an extra $15 on garbage bags.
My wife and I will never truly shake our frugal mindset, nor do we want to. I’m sure there are a ton of additional unconscious biases or habits I’ve built that I don’t even notice anymore that could go on this list, but by definition I can’t think of them. I don’t look at this list and think these are things I no longer have to do because they’re beneath me, I think of it more as a graduation to another level of my journey. Yes, I can obsess over the cost of groceries and meticulously budget each month like I used to when I started, or I can accept that we need food, we’ve optimized our spending habits, we’re not buying frivolously, and I can afford whatever we need each month.
No longer focusing on things I’ve already taken care of, or just don’t need to worry about anymore, frees me up to focus on larger items. Rather than worrying about the price of gas, since it’s already covered no matter the price, I can focus on saving to buy our next car in cash. Or maybe I can use that freed up brain power to focus on habits that I should probably start…
Freed by 50 