The Daily Frugal: Salami Slicing Your Budget
Saving is a daily grind. And I do mean grind.
The best way to look at a frugal life is like a river grinding up against a rock formation. On your average day, the river's only going to be claiming grits of sand and pebbles. Not much excitement there. But over time, that chipping and grinding produces stuff like the Grand Canyon.
"But didn't that take a kabillion years?" you say. To which I say, then you better get moving if you want to make a dent. And while much of the work of saving won't be appreciated til much later, there are times and circumstances when you will be amazed how fast tiny increments can add up.
Consider Office Space as an example. The frustrated cubicle slaves cook up what they think will be a get-rich-slow scam: carving fractions of a cent off of each of their company's transactions and diverting the funds into a private account (the official term for this is apparently salami slicing). When they take one decimal point too much, the shaving yields $300k in a matter of days instead of years.
Helping, pushing and bullying you into bumping up a decimal point is what this site is all about. Upping your saving intensity and cutting costs in every area of your life can produce huge yields for your future.
Today in Saving:
I woke up with a nasty cold today - phlegm everywhere, aches, fatigue. One the one hand, that's a positive. When you feel like crap, you are far less likely to impulse spend on stuff you need to feel good joy. For example, I swung by Amazon to eyeball a book I really want to read but haven't been able to find for free or dirt cheap at my usual haunts (libraries and Friends of the Library bookstores). $10 for a used paperback version. I was tempted! That sweet, sweet knowledge. Thankfully that the potency of that impulse was greatly weakened by the vice clamp on my sinuses and a throbbing headache - hard to visualize reading and enjoying a book in that state. So I x'd that tab without too much difficulty. Score $10 for the Fruglar.
On the other hand, when you're sick, the siren call of comfort food can become almost irresistible. Hot melty cheese. Succulent MSG-infused pepperoni. Nap-inducing dough. Hot-and-Ready relief. Came perilously close to rendering unto Little Caesar's what is Caesar's, if you know what I mean. To be fair, $5 for a large pepperoni pizza (big enough to feed a small family for 2 meals) is one of the best deals in fast food, but this would have been an unplanned, impulsive splurge. Still, I would have succumbed if not for some sneaky sabotage. In my cold-addled state this morning, I had completely forgotten to leave my wife the car seat, thus prompting me to forsake the pizza lunch and return home for leftovers.
The moral of the story: no matter what your mood or state of mind, there are going to be strong factors favoring both your impulse and your reluctance to spend. You don't need to transform yourself into a disciplined, hyper-rational machine to save money. Rather, choosing between a set of similarly irrational influences can allow you to lurch into good decisions in the same way that you would bad ones.
The best way to look at a frugal life is like a river grinding up against a rock formation. On your average day, the river's only going to be claiming grits of sand and pebbles. Not much excitement there. But over time, that chipping and grinding produces stuff like the Grand Canyon.
"But didn't that take a kabillion years?" you say. To which I say, then you better get moving if you want to make a dent. And while much of the work of saving won't be appreciated til much later, there are times and circumstances when you will be amazed how fast tiny increments can add up.
Consider Office Space as an example. The frustrated cubicle slaves cook up what they think will be a get-rich-slow scam: carving fractions of a cent off of each of their company's transactions and diverting the funds into a private account (the official term for this is apparently salami slicing). When they take one decimal point too much, the shaving yields $300k in a matter of days instead of years.
Helping, pushing and bullying you into bumping up a decimal point is what this site is all about. Upping your saving intensity and cutting costs in every area of your life can produce huge yields for your future.
Today in Saving:
I woke up with a nasty cold today - phlegm everywhere, aches, fatigue. One the one hand, that's a positive. When you feel like crap, you are far less likely to impulse spend on stuff you need to feel good joy. For example, I swung by Amazon to eyeball a book I really want to read but haven't been able to find for free or dirt cheap at my usual haunts (libraries and Friends of the Library bookstores). $10 for a used paperback version. I was tempted! That sweet, sweet knowledge. Thankfully that the potency of that impulse was greatly weakened by the vice clamp on my sinuses and a throbbing headache - hard to visualize reading and enjoying a book in that state. So I x'd that tab without too much difficulty. Score $10 for the Fruglar.
On the other hand, when you're sick, the siren call of comfort food can become almost irresistible. Hot melty cheese. Succulent MSG-infused pepperoni. Nap-inducing dough. Hot-and-Ready relief. Came perilously close to rendering unto Little Caesar's what is Caesar's, if you know what I mean. To be fair, $5 for a large pepperoni pizza (big enough to feed a small family for 2 meals) is one of the best deals in fast food, but this would have been an unplanned, impulsive splurge. Still, I would have succumbed if not for some sneaky sabotage. In my cold-addled state this morning, I had completely forgotten to leave my wife the car seat, thus prompting me to forsake the pizza lunch and return home for leftovers.
The moral of the story: no matter what your mood or state of mind, there are going to be strong factors favoring both your impulse and your reluctance to spend. You don't need to transform yourself into a disciplined, hyper-rational machine to save money. Rather, choosing between a set of similarly irrational influences can allow you to lurch into good decisions in the same way that you would bad ones.
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