Two weeks ago, I slunk out of the grocery store feeling ashamed.
Why? Because I’d wanted strawberries, and saw that they weren’t on sale. And I got them anyway. (!!!)
This isn’t how frugal people shop
All of my adult life, I’ve shopped the sales cycles as much as possible. I was taught that you wait until something goes on sale, then you buy a bunch to tide you over until it’s discounted once again.
Of course, you can’t reasonably load up on too much fruit. But since it’s more of an add-on than a staple, I was taught to just stick with what’s on sale. Or to do without until the fruit I wanted want was on special.
So I felt criminal spending retail — which, let’s be clear, was only $3.29 — for a bunch of berries that could easily go on sale the next week.
Silly mental math
Never mind that they were absolutely delicious and thus well worth the cost. And never mind that, outside of strawberries season, “sale prices” on strawberries are often still $2.99. So if I’d waited for a sale, I’d likely have saved just $0.30 a carton.
But the fact is that I would’ve been saving something. And that assuages my frugal fretting. Of course, I’m keenly aware that this is the exact kind of rationalization that groceries count on when putting fruit “on sale.”
Regardless, it makes me feel better. And less like a frugality fraud. Which is how I felt scanning those full-price berries.
The lesson here
The point of this tale is that frugality can make us rather irrational when it comes to spending on certain (usually small) things.
For example, if I’m going to be gone for the evening for trivia or whatnot, I don’t turn off all of the lights, in order to make it look like someone’s home. After all, it’s just for a few hours, so it doesn’t feel like a big deal.
But then I started doing overnight stays at He Who No Longer Wishes to Be Named’s place. Which meant using all — “all” — that electricity for as long as 17 hours. So I’d be wracked with guilt as I left.
In my defense, it wasn’t just one light. No sir. My house is rather dim, so I extravagantly flipped on two of lights. (Feel free to clutch your pearls.)
Like some sort of maniac, I just let the living room and dining room overhead lights beam away for most of a day. And five of the hours I was gone were peak times!
It felt so wasteful that each time I left the house, I’d debate just switching off one light at least. Would-be robbers would probably believe that someone would sit in a dim room, right?
(Fun fact: I just found an online calculator and determined that all the fretting I did was for about $0.36 of electricity each time.)
This is just silly
Many of us are lucky to not have a razor thin difference between our income and necessary expenses. So instances like these just highlight how weird our brains can be about frugality. Especially when you consider the things we don’t stress about.
I have no compunction (well… very little, anyway) about going to a bar and paying for two to three pricey specialty cocktails, which generally run $13 to $15 a pop. And if I’m drinking hard alcohol, I’m probably also paying for an Uber.
But when we’re talking about leaving two lights on all night? My brain screams, “What, are you a Rockefeller now?!”
I’m not alone
I’m hardly the only frugal person who deal with this dichotomy.
Frugal people will make decisions based on just a few cents’ difference. They’ll scour for deals and/or put off purchases while they wait for a sale. They’ll suffer a hotter house in the summer/colder one in the winter to save a few bucks.
Then they’ll turn around and buy a pricey phone, take up an expensive hobby or drop $1,000+ on a trip.
And that’s actually the way it should be.
If you’re in the fortunate position of being frugal by choice rather than necessity, then the whole point of frugality should be to saving where you can so you can spend on what matters.
Lots of value
I can attest that fresh strawberries matter to me. I cut them into quarters (both to keep my front teeth from taking the bulk of the acid and to make them last longer), then I sit in my chair watching TV and intermittently “mmmm”ing.
Oh and I suppose there’s value in that whole “strawberries are healthy” thing.
Similarly I very much like spending time with someone I’m seeing. And $0.36 of electricity is far better than my $1,000 insurance deductible if the house did get broken into. So I get a lot of value there too.
And if you’re getting value out of something, it’s not a waste, is it? So my fretting is just plain silly. But seemingly unavoidable.
How I calm myself
If I can’t avoid it, then I just try to put it all in context.
Do I get a lot of value from this spending? Yes. Do I serenely choose to spend way more than these amounts in other parts of my life? Yup!
Well then, why is this small unnecessary expense such a big deal? Answer: It really isn’t.
Unfortunately, this only deals with the guilt of the specific situation. The next time I’m looking at paying retail or leaving lights on, I’ll once again wrestle with low-level guilt.
I don’t know that there’s any permanent way to shake this silly and rather sporadic guilt. But at least I don’t let it stop me from eating/doing the things I enjoy. That’s a small victory, I guess.
What’s your irrational frugal guilt? How do you deal with it?
It just part of how smart people see money, we have programmed ourselves to spend lavishly on the things we value highly and to cut mercilessly on items that we don’t get excited over. Its not a bug, its a feature! When I travel 100 miles to the city for a consulting gig I carry an ice chest and put leftovers from my restaurant meals in it to bring home. I just hate wasting good tasty food. And we’ve got millions in retirement, much more than we need, but still… wasting stuff is bad. I think you are wired just right!
I often do the same with food items. It’s like my brain doesn’t calculate that the difference between a sale price of 2.99 is only 30 cents less than regular price of 3.29.
Yeah, I tell myself it’s not really a “sale” at $0.30 — especially when during strawberry season you’ll see them for $1.50 or even $0.97 sometimes — but it feels more okay than retail.
Well, it’s a feature when it allows you to live a good life or avoid waste. It’s a bug when you feel guilty about spending full price on healthy fruit.
And yes, whenever I travel, I try to get a place that offers mini-fridges. (Even if they’re not in your room specifically, you can request one usually.) So leftovers get used. Another good use: get meat(s), cheese(s) and rolls and make delicious but cheap sandwiches.
Sorry about installing that frugal-guilt button….
Today at Fred Meyer the really good Private Selection chocolate ganache ice cream was a coupon special for $3.47 — normally it’s $6.99. Yet I actually hesitated, because the Kroger brand was $3.
Ummm….It’s chocolate ganache! Get it!
But I did hesitate. Dumb, really.
As for strawberries, you should eat MORE of them. Harvard sez so:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-new…
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Yeah Kroger brand chocolate is not on the same level as Private Selection’s Chocolate Ganache, I feel certain. But I get it. (And for one of the first times in history, I found a generic that wasn’t all that good compared to the brand name: the Kroger version of Grasshoppers leave much to be desired when you’ve had the original ones. Guess I’ll have to… wait for a sale!
And yay, I’m slightly healthy! At the rate I take in strawberries, I’ll live forever I guess. But also anyone who eats a lot of berries DEFINITELY needs to invest in enamel-rebuilding toothpaste.
Abby, I love this post! I inherited this trait from my dad, who was thrifty as all get out (and also a ChFC), but it’s your mom’s voice I hear every time I do one of these minutely wasteful things, ( I also hear her cheers every time I save so much as a nickel with a coupon, discount, bonus offer or other hack.) Donna, working with you at the ADN turned out to be a godsend to my finances, and I thank you for that. You presented “saving” as fun personal challenge and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to win at it!
Aw, well I’m glad she was able to help. But I think she’d be the first (if she’d seen the comment) to say that she doesn’t want you to hear her judging you for “wasteful” activities if they do bring value to your life. But yeah overall it’s good to have someone’s voice in our heads keeping us on track!
I miss those days.
Donna Freedman recently posted…The Saver’s Credit: An overlooked tax boost.
I was raised by depression era babies who only knew one way to function. Be frugal, reuse, re-purpose, need vs want, etc. So I myself am frugal. It is a game I play with myself, but as I grew older I started to also figure out that my time was worth something. So I had to ask if it was worth it to return to the grocery store next week (even though I won’t really need anything) or drive to another grocery store. Did my want outweigh my need? A lot of mental gymnastics. I decided my time was valuable and I have stopped letting my guilt over not getting the VERY best price rule my decisions. I still have a little guilt and I still love to get the best price, but it no longer bothers me so much.
I’m really glad to hear that you give value to your time/energy. Yeah, it’s not ideal for us to not pay the absolute lowest price, but it’s also not ideal for us to not have energy for basic things — or even not-basic things like socializing — because we were hell-bent on saving $1-2. It’s hard to let the guilt go, but I’m working on it.
I’ll steal Ramit Sethi’s line of “spend on things you love and save on things you don’t.” Fruit is good for you and you like it! Go spend that extra 30 cents. I am a sucker for a sale sticker though myself.
Impersonal Finances recently posted…Home Is Where The Paycheck Is
Yeah, intellectually I know it’s worth it. I just have to work on being rational haha And yeah, sale stickers are alluring. Which means we have to be careful that we’re not tempted to buy things just because they’re on sale. The other end of the spectrum in this subject.
“If you’re in the fortunate position of being frugal by choice rather than necessity, then the whole point of frugality should be to saving where you can so you can spend on what matters.”
yessssss x 10000!
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Yes, this is what I keep telling myself — and one day it will sink in all the way!
I really enjoy reading your posts…but did you increase the advertising space on the website? I could only read a few paragraphs — or even just a few lines — before a New Ad for Something leaped out at me. (The chesty ‘Are you Christian and single’ repeated ads were especially weird.)
I may be the only one who has these mentally get in the way — but maybe not. Especially when they change — and change again, quickly — as you scroll down.
Keep up the great writing.
Aw thank you for the kind words. Are you on a phone? I was checking a post on my phone recently and felt like there was an extra ad where there shouldn’t be. I’ll check and see what I can find.
My brain insists that every penny counts so a 30 cent savings is meaningful. Brain, shush sometimes!
PiC was not wired the same way but he learned it from watching me so he’s super mindful of how we choose to spend large amounts the way that I watch small amounts like a hawk. It’s funny to see sometimes because it’s so different from how we both started out. I’ll say I WILL PAY THE MONEY TO NOT HAVE YOU DO IT and he’ll hem and haw. Once it used to be him paying the big bucks and me refusing to. But our time IS worth something, truly, and our health doubly so.
YUM strawberries!
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I’m glad you’re willing to pay when it comes to your and his time! It’s so important when that distinction of time/energy being valuable finally breaks through our mental barriers.
I am like your “usually” frugal self. Full-price strawberries nope. Half price strawberries? I ‘ll have two boxes please. My husband buys what he wants when he wants and is not motivated by sales. He thinks that buying more just because something is cheap leads to waste. (Which reminds me there is a turkey breast I must dispose of…)
I do think there is a balance. When my son was little he wanted cantaloupe in the winter. I tried explaining that paying $4 for something which would be $2 in six months was foolish. Then I remembered he had no concept of what six months was. I bought the fruit.
Now I am trying to eat healthier and paying full sticker price for fresh fruit and veg is off-putting. I try to see the big picture. I might end up spending $10 more per week ($500 a year.) Big whoop. That wouldn’t pay my co-pay for a medical procedure.