Created by Mike Donghia. Subscribe to our blog for free daily updates.
You can learn a lot from reading books, but the most vivid lessons of my life have been lived experiences.
You can read something and believe it to be true with your mind, but you don’t truly learn it until your heart believes it.
That’s absolutely been the case for my own journey with frugal living.
Things that once seemed like truisms to me, began to take on new meaning.
In this post, I want to share a few selection of the many lessons I’ve internalized after embracing a lifestyle of frugality.
You don’t need as much as you think you do.
What’s a need and what’s a want? I used to find it very hard to separate the two until a thing was taken away from me completely.
Living frugally has shown me how little I really need for a good life: food, water, clothing and beyond that some people to love and a job to do.
Every dollar you save is time reclaimed for something else.
I enjoy watching baseball, and used to pay for the channel, but now I play ball in the backyard with my boys.
Every dollar not spent is a dollar I don’t have to earn.
It makes my life a little freer than it otherwise would have been.
The best way to curb an impulse is to delay it.
I was horrified a few years back to scroll through an entire year of Amazon orders— over 100 of them.
Each purchase seemed important at the time, but looking back, I could raise serious questions about a quarter of them.
The impulse to buy comes in hot and heavy, but dissipates after just a few hours.
Now, I try to follow the 48-hour rule, and delay every purchase by 2 days. By then, I can think about it more clearly.
The happiest moments in life are free.
When I stripped back my spending and my constant quest to entertain myself, I found that the things I enjoyed most were free, or barely cost anything at all.
Maybe this sounds trite. I wouldn’t have believed it before living it myself.
Frugality brings a new perspective, because when you can’t reach for instant gratification as often, you adapt and find new sources of pleasure.
Nothing correlates with success more than your ability to regulate emotions.
When you allow yourself to indulge anytime you want, you never really get to see what you’re made of.
A spartan lifestyle makes you face your emotions head on.
I came to realize that success in my financial life really came down to how well I could manage those emotions when they ran hot.
It’s no surprise, this lesson isn’t just about finances, but really everything we do.
The greater a challenge, the easier it becomes.
An odd observation: it’s often easier to do hard things than easy ones.
Telling yourself to cut back on spending here and there is just an annoyance.
It’s not particularly fun and it involves making constant decisions about when it’s ok to spend, and when you should be frugal.
But what if you went all-in with extreme frugality?
Suddenly, those same tasks would be part of a larger challenge, an adventure even.
That’s how I felt when we finally decided to get serious about our lifestyle change.
Motivation came out of nowhere, when before it was like finding a drop of water in the desert.
Convenience has quickly diminishing returns.
If you look around, most of what we spend our marginal dollars on is easier entertainment or convenience.
Both have steeply diminishing returns.
In the case of convenience, it seems logical that spending money to make life easier would be a clear win. And often it is.
But at a certain point, you’re spending so much of your money and effort on making life easy, that you “get out of shape” and even the smallest difficulty becomes a great frustration.
There’s a certain amount of fiction in life that keeps us grounded, and helps us to enjoy rest and relaxation in their proper time.
Money can buy happiness, but it’s surprisingly difficult.
I’m not talking about deep-rooted joy, of course. I’m just noting that on a day-to-day basis, money can buy some happiness.
You’d be mistaken for thinking this was an easy exchange, but it isn’t.
When we started living frugally (or more accurately, when we stepped it up), I realized that I was just as happy as ever— or even more so.
What was the point of all that spending then?
The surprise is how quickly we get used to the things money can buy.
Suddenly, they’re expected instead of icing on the cake.
Every dollar you spend is a vote for the life you want.
By really taking a look at every dollar that went out our door, I came to a newfound appreciation for what money really is.
Each dollar is a vote for the kind of life you want to live.
It’s true that we choose how to spend our money, but with equal force, those choices begin to shape us.
It’s true what the bible says, that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
This lesson reinforced the idea of our family living generously towards others, even while we were trying to be frugal.
There is true pleasure in the “joy of missing out”.
You’ve heard of FOMO, right? The fear of missing out.
There’s no doubt it hurts to miss out on experiences you see your peers having, and wondering if you’re getting left behind.
But every coin has two sides.
Instead of feeling like you’re missing out, you can re-shape that narrative to one where you are curating the life you want, and that means saying no to a lot of things.
People who eat super-healthy diets, don’t regret not being able to enjoy sweet treats, they relish the fact that they’ve chosen something even better for them.
Living frugally can be that way, too.
You come to see that you have more of the things you want in your life, not less.
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