Friday, September 01, 2006

Friday Spotlight: Frugal For Life

Welcome to the Frugal Weekend Spa. Dawn of Frugal for Life checks in as this week’s Friday Spotlight Guest. Frugal for Life was one of the first frugal blogs that caught my eye. Her no-nonsense posts made lots of sense to me. And her site was filled with great nuggets of information and insight. The following essay captures the essence of her philosophy.


Frugality Equals Time

by Dawn of Frugal For Life

I get comments on occasion that having nice stuff isn't a bad thing: I work hard for my money and I will spend it the way I want to. Frugal living is for fools who want to live a dreary life.

"Ah my friend, you may bake your cake and feel you deserve to eat it too. But what amount of time are you putting into that special cake?" You see it isn't about money many times, it is about time. From the day we are born we want to grow up fast and be an adult and we become adults we want to turn back time or we hold on to it for dear life. Time is more precious than money, more valuable than gold.


So let's take a look at buying the nice stuff with time, bear with me on this. Let's say you wake up next Monday and there is a world-wide passage of a law that you are no longer being paid in cash money but hours in a bank that can be exchanged for stuff. Would you go along with this? Let's say you do….


At the end of the day you have 8 hours in your bank, what will you do with it? If you buy sweater at Saks you may only have 1 hour left to bank for a rainy day. The other option is to go to a thrift store and give them a half- hour of you banked time, and instead get a second hand item that 'looks like' it was bought at Saks.


Let's say you bought the ½ hour sweater and now have 7 ½ hours left in your bank for a rainy. The next day after work, you check your cell phone (that costs you 2 hours bank time a month) and see that the company has put in another 8 hours. Now you have 15 ½ hours of bank time; where as if you had gone to Saks the day before, you would have only had 9 hours of bank time. All in all, you have saved yourself some time by looking at alternatives.


The same is true when you consider the items you buy today, It's not about how much that doggy is in the window, it is about how much of my hard worked time, is that doggy in the window. When you sell something and don't get the price you would like, you feel gypped, you put in hard worked time to pay for that and you feel you should get compensated much better for the time.


Like I said before, frugalness isn't really about money so much, but about the value of our time. If you want the best, then you must be willing to sacrifice the time to get it. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time to sacrifice; it's the one thing we can't go into debt on.

~Dawn

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