I briefly touched on the topic of frugal living in yesterday’s post, but truly, it is enough of a science to fill volumes. Whole blogs have been written solely on this particular topic. Instead of getting bogged down with the details, then, I would like to outline the guiding principle behind frugal living: simplicity.
Simplicity is the notion of spending no more or less than we have to in order to accomplish intentional goals. While this categorically forbids unbridled consumerism, there is a good deal of variation within the principle to allow for a wide range of income levels and lifestyles. At its core, simplicity is about being intentional with every aspect of one’s life. Because intentionality takes some real mental effort, sometimes it feels quite complicated. However, taking control of one’s life, including one’s finances, is a far preferable state of affairs to the complexities that arise from unintentional living. Failing to practice intentional simplicity leads to impulse buying, waste, and generally a greater number of financial emergencies. Not all financial emergencies stem from this—life is complicated, and there are many circumstances one can’t control. Being deliberate wherever possible, though, mitigates much of life’s unpredictability. Money is tied to emotions, and few things reveal values quite like a bank statement. It doesn’t give the entire picture, of course (schedules are often equally revealing, if not more so). The art of frugal living is, first and foremost, to draw distinctions between wants and needs—and then to focus vigorously on the needs as the first priority. For example, I need to eat. I want to eat out with friends, to try every random ingredient in the grocery store, and to try one of those fancy meal services that deliver to your door, but I don’t need any of those things. If I can afford to do so, there may be good reasons to pursue some of those wants from time to time, but they are unrelated to the legitimate biological need to eat to survive. Those wants are actually about other kinds of needs and desires, such as social connection, expressing creativity, and convenience—which may be possible to fulfill in another way. The easiest needs to start considering are the physical. As human beings, we need food, shelter, a little clothing, and some medical care to get by. We don’t need the last one all the time, but getting blindsided by a need in that area or failing to do preventative maintenance on our health can be way more costly in the long run than actually spending the money on some basic health insurance in the first place. This is also, incidentally, where the question of food can be complicated. Once upon a time, I was actually too poor to afford much in the way of fruits and vegetables. My meals were almost uniformly rice, pasta, Ramen, boxed Mac and Cheese, or something else of that nature. Aaaaand that’s how I gained the 90 pounds that I’m now working earnestly to shed. I’m young and still have the ability to bounce back from that, but decades of eating a poverty diet can do irreparable damage. With time and experience, I have learned low-cost ways to eat better than I did then, but there’s only so much you can do when you make $1200 a month and $750 of that is going into rent before you even consider other concerns like health insurance, a working phone, Wifi, or textbooks for your graduate school classes. One of the messiest struggles in striving for financial simplicity, then, is to ensure that you balance the financial concerns of the moment with those of the future. It’s easy, for example, to get really cheap clothing if you know where to look—but you may end up paying more in the long run, depending on what it is. I could still be wearing some of my 2-Euro shirts from 10 years ago if I hadn’t gained weight, but a cheap item I bought a few months ago from Walmart is already in appalling shape. The wardrobe items worth spending good money on are the workhorse items—the stuff you wear almost all the time. This means undergarments, basic pairs of pants, and the neutral pieces that can go with almost anything (like, say, a sturdy pair of black dress shoes). Yes, those things are boring compared to the colorful shirts, dresses, and accent pieces that can be easy to buy on impulse, but accent pieces don’t wear out as quickly as basics. If you crave more color, try thrifting or praying for a gift card. This hits on something that seriously affects the way most people get lured into breaking their commitment to frugality: the social mirror. Because this is a big enough topic on its own for its own piece, we will leave it for tomorrow. Meanwhile, the art of sifting wants from needs is to identify what you really can and cannot live without. When we learn to make that distinction, we are freed from the cycle of consumerism and can better appreciate the comforts we already enjoy. Frugality is less about self-denial than it is about living deliberately and spending money where it actually counts.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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