Frugal? Absolutely!

Everyone, without exception, believes themselves to be frugal. When actor Jack Nicholson uses a hundred dollar bill to light a cigar, he is patting himself on the back for not using two. I am sure he would admit that there might be room for improvement, but he, at least, is pleased by his effort.

We are having great fun at being frugal. I am pretty sure everyone does. I have thought about why and come up with several reasons. One big reason, as Jack illustrates above, each of us gets to set the bar for their own frugality, so everyone can play and be as successful at it as they need to be to feel bit smug.

Smug is such a great feeling, and to feel smug, all you need do is define something as a bargain (actual cost is irrelevant), buy it and feel smug at how cleverly frugal you are. Of course, we all have our limits on just what we are willing to do to be frugal and that creates the difference in levels between Jacks's frugality and mine.

To get a handle on my frugality, I try to examine how wasteful I am. This is really painful and absolutely no fun. Taken to extremes, this can lead to despair and wondering what would it be like now if only I had ..... So, I try to examine just the immediate past, where my indiscretions are fewer and smaller. Lets look at a trip to town from last week. We stopped at the KFC-Taco Bell for lunch. (When we eat badly, we don't mess around.) By splitting a special box meal "deal", we spent just over ten dollars. At home, our lunches cost a little less than a dollar each. Many days they are almost free since we eat mostly food we have grown. So, this is a glaring failure to be frugal despite splitting the special. Instead of feeling smug, I got a feeling like I just ate a meal at KFC.

Also last week, we had to go to Bangor. On the way into town, Kris noted the gas prices at each station. On the way back we filled up where gas was cheapest. This time of year, we try to keep the tank full to avoid condensation and if we run out of money before more comes in, we can still get around and be mobilly broke. By shopping where the gas was two cents cheaper, we are now fourteen cents richer. I doubt if Jack Nicholson would take the trouble to save fourteen cents, but you never know, he might have because you can be frugal in one area and tremendously wasteful in another, which you can see by noting that if we keep saving two cents on gas every time we fill up, we will be able to stop at KFC-Taco Bell for another incredible lunch in just seventy more trips to the gas station.

Coffee is another area where there is tremendous potential to be frugal. When I was working out and about, I used to drink two cups a day which I believe averaged about a dollar a cup. I felt that to be pretty frugal at the time- now it pains me to think of it. So it amounted to $10 a week. Annualized that's 520 bucks a year. I have to put in a disclaimer here-- I can't tell the difference between Starbucks and generic coffee. When it is too strong, which it invariably is as the price per cup goes up, it is less enjoyable. I now buy the cheapest coffee Wal-Mart sells and brew it myself (in a French Press). I buy a can every two months, spend six dollars and brew it at an enjoyably weak level. My annualized cost is now $36.
Most of you who have used the word brewista in a sentence would love to have just a $520 annualized cost. If your coffee expenses were in a 401K you could retire twenty years sooner. Still, you may feel frugal if you go to a local gourmet coffee shop and save a fifty cents a cup over the Starbucks price. I used coffee because of the vast variability in costs you can pay. I would suggest not actually doing the math on this one if you have used the word brewista. When your coffee expenses exceed your mortgage, it makes it very hard to feel smug about any of your other frugality's.

I have to mention our breakfasts while musing about frugality. We started eating oatmeal dutifully when we began getting AARP mailings. (If you can't trust Wilford Brimly, who can you trust.) We added flax for omega 3's, bananas for potassium, blueberries for vitamin C and anti-oxidants, and cinnamon to fight off adult onset diabetes. The entire blob of healthy goo costs about a 30 cents a bowl. The annualized cost of our breakfast diet is around a hundred dollars a piece, which makes me feel smug about eating healthy and being frugal. Every morning, we start out with a good diet and feeling doubly smug. I imagine it will make us live to be a hundred and feel smug about that too! A triple smug, it just doesn't get any better! Makes me kind of feel sorry for Jack Nicholson.