I’ve noticed sometimes that there’s some half-baked videos or blogs or whatever that purport this or that frugal trick, but if you look at the time or math, it’s not actually frugal for you.
What are some examples of that you’ve come across? The things that “aren’t worth it”?
For me it’s couponing. (Although I haven’t heard people talk about it recently–has it fallen out of “style”, or have businesses caught up to the loopholes folks used to exploit?)
It’s more of a generalized rule but:
Assume that your own time has value.
A lot of “frugal” tips operate off the assumption that you can spend your own time and it doesn’t cost anything. But your time is valuable. Time spent trying to save a few bucks should be considered working time; ask yourself how much you would get paid by your job for the same amount of time. Maybe you enjoy doing whatever the thing is, so it can be considered recreation, but if it’s some difficult or mind numbing slog, then that doesn’t necessarily mean that you actually saved yourself anything, because you weren’t getting paid to do work, and you could have been doing something more rewarding instead.
I feel this way about cooking. I hate cooking. It takes a lot of time. And lots of cleanup time. And time spent planning and shopping. Plus the tools, ingredients, and power/gas/water used all cost money. With all that in mind, a $9 bowl of chipotle is significantly cheaper by my estimation than cooking an equivalent myself.
Then you need to learn how to cook properly, or get more experience. By the time you have driven to and from chipotle, and factor in that time, the cost of gas, the wear and tear on your car. Cooking is significantly cheaper. We only cook from scratch at home, and it rarely takes more than 15 mins to whip up a good meal that tastes better than most things you can buy, even sit down restaurants. When I cook, I clean as I go normally, so clean up aftewards is fast. If you clean up immediately after, clean up is fast. Time spent eating doesn’t count. 20 minutes, McDonalds drive thru takes 20 mins.
Honestly, to me, that would be incredibly fast prep or your meals are pretty simple. Even easy meals I’ve made a million times take me half an hour. Most take one hour to cook and I still feel like I’m rushing around.
I live somewhere where I have access to dozens of restaurants within a 5 minute drive and I can order ahead to avoid waiting. Cooking really is not an activity I enjoy so I have no interest in practicing unless I have to. That is not to say I never have food at home. I regularly make healthy super smoothies, sandwiches loaded with greens, prepared salads, and whole grain cereals. I wouldn’t consider that cooking though.
I’m not looking to invalidate the experience of anyone who is good at or enjoys cooking. Just sharing my opinion that this is one area that is very commonly recommended for saving money that I personally don’t find worth my time.
I’m with you on cooking something like one meal. If I’m going to get out a bunch of stuff in the kitchen and put in that much effort, then I had better be eating for at least a few days off of what I make. Casseroles, stews, big pots of pasta, and holy hell was I excited when I learned how much curry I could make in one big crock pot and then put that on rice for like two weeks’ worth of meals.
I would not habe worked in that time. I would have sat on the sofa and watched something on Netflix that I do not care about.
It is not a crime to be unproductive. In fact, we all need to be unproductive occasionally.
Growing your own food. The only way to make that shit pay is to groom a cult to do it for you, large-scale.
The only way to make that shit pay is to groom a cult to do it for you, large-scale.
They’re called grand parents
I still buy the vast majority of my own food, but:
I’ve been eating the same $0.99 bell pepper going on three years now.
A $3 packet of jalapeno seeds has made a year’s worth of taco tuesdays.
I’ll never buy Mint again; I couldn’t get rid of my patch of peppermint if I wanted to.
I can grow much better tomatoes than what you’ll find at the local mega mart.
A $3 packet of okra seeds will thicken a year’s worth of gumbo.
My little vegetable garden, which is smaller than my living room, yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 pounds of produce every year.
Respect for that - I was mostly trying to be funny with my post, I have to admit. If you have a good patch of garden, with good soil and conditions, I guess that can pay financially, and for sure psychologically. But if you have none of that… I have eaten too many shitty tomatoes grown on friends’ and neighbors’ balconies to be kind towards that anymore.
Apparently even touching soil has psychological benefits! Something to do with a certain bacteria present in it.
Growing your own greens and herbs is super easy with a hydroponic setup, but obviously you have to invest the time into getting it set up. There are a lot of pre-made options available these days, though, so it’s not as much work as it used to be even just a few years back. Saves me a lot of trips to the grocery store.
The cheapest food is always a massive rip off. It doesn’t matter if you’re willing to settle for something that doesn’t taste as good. The cheapest food has been stripped down to such nothingness that you need to eat 3x more to stay alive. It doesn’t work for the same reason you can’t just drink water and feel full.
Flights with connections. Flying has become so tedious, frustrating, stressful, that saving money by spending yet more hours dealing with it, just isn’t worth it. I’d sooner cancel the trip
I saved $500 per ticket on an international flight for my girlfriend and I and the extra connection should have only added a few hours to the trip.
Then they cancelled my flight, and I got stranded in another country (Canada), spent over 10 hours in the airport getting a new flight, lost two days of the trip, which were the best days, lost the money I paid for the hotel for those days, and I only get a few days off a year and that was how I spent several of them.
The Europeans and Canadians on the flight got their flight comped. Being an American, I had to fight for a meal ticket that didn’t even cover the cost of two sodas. This was pre-pandemic too.
Oof 😭
Businesses have caught up and fixed the exploits.
For me, it’s dried beans. Beans are an excellent source of protein and fiber, and it doesn’t get much cheaper per serving than bulk dried beans.
But rinsing, soaking over night, and then boiling, only to end up with way more beans than we will consume, and canned beans are almost as good and almost as cheap.
We use a pressure cooker for our dried beans. 20-40 minutes depending on the bean. You don’t have to soak them overnight when using a pressure cooker. I ensure that each batch we make is consumed within five days.
Canned beans are considerably more expensive based on the amount we eat.
If you only eat a can here and there, it’s probably not worth making them from dry.
I’ve found pressure cookers are the only way I can get beans tender. (I’m not a great cook.)
Do you have hard water? That can make beans not get soft if you’re boiling them.
Soaking the beans with baking soda also help tremendously to get softer beans.
Probably not frugal, but instant pot changed my life, in regards to soaking beans. What a time/effort saver.
Can you share your technique? I have a giant bag of black beans and I always reach for a can instead because it’s such a hassle.
Pour em in the pot, fill with water about an inch over the top of the beans. 40 mins, and pull em, or 30 mins with 15 min natural release (recommended, but I almost never do it).
This is a little different from the others on this list, but a lot of DIY stuff for parties/weddings. The money you’re saving is negated by time lost, not to mention unless you have unlimited time/ no job and are able to thrift everything, the components for DIY aren’t that inexpensive. For my sister’s wedding, we did everything ourselves. Everything from literally painting the venue, collecting/creating every table scape, my dad built the stage and dance floor, all the way through setting up the hundreds of little desserts on the day of. It was all wonderful and lovely. And took a massive amount of time and labor across several families. When you factor in the value of people’s time, it was not less expensive than mine. We rented everything and it was so nice not to stress about dressing every corner of the room or decorating the bar, or making sure we didn’t run out of ice on the day of. We still chose super frugal options because the wedding industry is a scam, but we just paid for everything.
Sometimes it’s worth it just to pay people to do stuff. Value your time and mental health more than money.
The cheapest option is always cheapest for a reason. Incrementally so the amount cheaper it is than the average.
The way I’ve come to phrase this principle:
You don’t always get what you pay for, but you definitely don’t get what you don’t pay for.
I always thought couponing looked obnoxious.
I don’t care if I save $0.35 per grocery trip or $35. I really don’t. And I’m definitely not wealthy! But when it comes to all those valuable pieces of paper, I’ve decided I’m not making the cashier scan and verify them one-by-one, the people behind me in line wait the extra time, the bookkeeper add them up and send them in, and then whatever clearing house wage-slave collect and destroy them.
I realize that sounds judgemental, but that’s just my threshold. I genuinely feel everyone needs to decide how they want to live their life…
my grocery store’s app has a coupon section. I can scroll through them and add them to my loyalty card, so that they all get added to my order automatically. It’s at least as valid a use of my time as playing Crossy Road. I don’t use paper coupons.
I worked for a big chain store. Like, a really big chain store, but not that one.
At the end of the night, they would collect all the coupons from the registers, weigh them, and throw them away.
The store would get credited based on the weight.
Cloth nappies/diapers. Cleaning them is a black hole for personal time.
The manufacture of 2.5 years of disposable diapers has a lower carbon footprint than the energy usage to launder cloth diapers over the same time period.
So it’s still a win if the energy source is renewable itself.
What about the difference in waste as well? Talk about cherry-picking outcomes to make your product/position look good. It’s like soft drinks advertising that they’re fat-free or chips/crisps saying they’re sugar-free
The linked study includes disposal in their calculations. Disposables still come out ahead.
Thanks for clarifying. I don’t have time to dig into it now. The data’s from 2006. I think it’s fair to say that improvements in energy efficient laundry machines (and detergent) in the last 17 years have been significant - and at a glance laundry-related energy costs represent the lion’s share of reusables’ footprint per this study. I’d love to see more up-to-date data and see if disposables still come out ahead, which would surprise me
I’ll see if I can find some better ones. This was just the first one I plucked out of a random citation, because I knew I would get eviscerated without one. But I’ve been seeing the advice about disposables as far back as I can remember. It was even a trick question in an eco quiz when I was a child back in the 90s (i.e. “Which of these things are better ecological choices?”).
Interestingly the 2006 study itself is an updated version. Disposables did even better in the 2006 study than in the older one: Due to advances in manufacturing and in materials science, they were able to start producing them using less material (which decreases the carbon footprint during manufacturing, shipping, and disposal).
If you’re interested, here’s a 2009 Australian environmental study in which reusable diapers come out on top: https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/2096268/08.1-Attachment-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Reusable-and-Disposable-Nappies.pdf
Using things outside of their intended purposes. I live in a gated community with my folks. Our house borders an apartment complex community, the border is a fence followed by a hedge in our backyard. We have several fruit trees in our backyard including avocados and mangoes. During fruiting season, avocados will drop and fall over the fence. My mom uses a pvc pipe with a kitchen knife taped to one end to use as a spear to retrieve avocados over the fence on the other community’s side. 5+ kitchen knives have been broken by doing this. I recently bought a 30ft fruit picker to collect fruit before they drop, so hopefully that helps to alleviate the problem.
DOCAZOO DocaPole 7-30 Foot (30 ft Reach) Fruit Picker and Telescopic Extension Pole for Apples, Avocados, Oranges, and Other Fruit Trees https://a.co/d/hZUlhHK
frugal
> cant ask neighbors to come in and pick their avocados
> uses spears insteadno, that’s not frugality, those are signs of mental ineptitude
I should have clarified. She wants to retrieve her avocados that have fallen over the other community’s side.
Here’s a picture of the fence and hedge.
Here’s a picture of our tree.
Searching for the cheapest gas station. Too much time and gas.
In Australia there are apps that show cheapest prices near you, so at least there’s not too much time and effort involved.
The people who tell you that you are poor because you get coffee at a coffee shop every day. At best you would save ~$2000/year if you bought $5 cup everyday. $2000 saved would not be a significant amount of money to make in an investment either. Personal happiness isn’t worth trying to cut out things you like.
It’s all about context though. $2000 is substantial to much of the people who live on this planet. You’re right about that amount in investment returns would be considered small, but the people who this amount is significant don’t usually have investments to rely on.
Sure it might not be a huge amount in one year until you notice that it’s not just a year, it’s the rest of your life. then 30 years later you have saved $60000 with interest.
It’s funny, the same people who told me the same thing spent their whole life saving money. 20 years later they are still saving money and haven’t once traveled the world, still live in the same general area, but still are still saving their money. For what? I don’t know. The most valuable commodity is your youth. Worth much more than $60k or $150k when your bones are withered.
You are on a frugal community dude, do you not get the whole point is convenient ways to save money. Making your own coffee or not drinking coffee at all is a very worthwhile endeavor. It takes about the same amount of time as drive to a coffee shop and get a drink. The only plausible thing I can think of is that you are being sarcastic. Otherwise just leave this community alone, some people actually need help and I don’t really think you would have any valuable insights.
$2000 extra a year into a 401k over a lifetime of work is a substantial amount of money when you retire. This 401k calculator estimates it as $150k after 45 years. That sounds high to me but regardless $2k extra a year is a lot when you consider compound interest over decades.
