Super Sporty?

honestly, the changing clothes aspect is what
 freaks me out the most.

I've always said that I would be interested in attempting a tri-athalon, but I neither swim nor bike.  I mean, I do know how to swim, I took lessons as a youth, but I certainly don't have anything resembling a technique, and I've barely been in the water since age twelve.  Likewise, prior to about six months ago, I hadn't been on a bike since junior high, and riding my new bike has quickly taught me that I'm really not very good at it--my legs were burning after a mere two miles!

Here's the rub though.

My new gym has a very nice pool, and I would kind of like to use it.  Especially since the month of February was my most injury-plagued month ever in my life (one injury, but a stupid, tenacious one), and I started remembering that swimming is a great, low impact workout that could be perfect for a gimpy girl like me!  I emailed a friend who used to be sporty but who has since given it up, and asked her if she had some goggles I could borrow.  Not only did she lend me goggles to keep indefinitely, but she gave me a swim cap (which I'm a bit scared to try on), and while we were chatting, something else came up.

Apparently, she still has a really nice racing bicycle that's just chilling out in her scary basement.  It needs a bit of work, but could be totally serviceable--and she'd let me use it.  So now it seems like my biggest excuse: I don't want to pay a ton of money for a good racing bike, is out the window.

I'm trying not to get ahead of myself because presently I've only ridden my bike once and I still haven't gone swimming, but there's a germ of an idea there.

I mean, if life gives you lemons, you make lemonade ergo, if life lends you a nice racing bike, you must do a tri-athalon?  Even with the free bike, this sounds like a lovely new way to spend gobs of money on gear and registration fees all in the name of 'health.'  Or you could look at it as a great way to potentially kill myself doing the Escape From Alcatraz Tri-Athalon that Danie and I talked about doing two years ago... remember that, Danie? How awesome would it be to escape from Alcatraz?

It's Easier to be Broke

Has anyone else ever felt that way? Sure, it sucks to be broke, but when you have no money, you know you can't spend. If you have a little bit of money, then you have to pick and choose where it goes. It requires a lot more thought and effort than just knowing you can't afford to spend.

Do you save it? Where/how do you save it? Do you spend it little by little? Do you save it up for one big purchase? Do you invest it?

Even if you are good and save, it seems like you could always save more and do without something. Did I really need that coffee? Why did I buy those brown pants? When you make the committment to frugality, even if it's a change you want to make, there's still the lingering guilt occasionally of not being frugal enough, or not being able to go without something that someone else seems to never think about. It's kind of like the tea bag situation all over again.

I read an article the other day about a local lottery winner. He had been laid off from his janitorial job for nearly a year, but continued to play the lottery twice a week. He actually won last week, and his take-home was $680,000. It's one of those heart-warming stories that we don't get enough of, made all the nicer by the fact that he really needed the money and it's right in time for christmas. Certainly I'm very happy for he and his family, but I immediately started thinking about what I would do with that much money and started freaking out a bit.

Naturally, I would pay off my student loans immediately. I'd still have over half a million dollars then. FDIC insurance is only for $100,000, so I'd need six different savings accounts to store the money that way. I guess I could buy a house, or two, and renovate them; I could travel, but I don't want to quit working....

Obviously, I will never have this much money, but just the idea of it completely stressed me out for about 30 minutes. It doesn't take a genius to see that that is probably an unhealthy way to think about money, but I may not be as crazy as you think. My primary concern is to use the money well, which should always be primary. My secondary concern is to save/invest it in a sensible way where it will either earn interest or grow in another way (like real estate investments used to do). Tertiary is not giving up my career and earning power just to live a life of luxury that certainly will not last.

Even though such a large sum is overwhelming, I think my three rules are pretty sound. Yes, it's easier to be broke, but it's also easier to live with your parents and sit around the house watching tv all day, which is certainly not preferable.

What would you do if you won the lottery?

It gets awkward

One of the big drawbacks to living a frugal life is the near-constant thought of money. I'm getting used to that, it's becoming routine, but tied in with that is the near constant appraisal of other's money--does anyone else do that? I'm not saying that I do it in a malicious or envious way, but when I know approximately how much people make, I find myself wondering how do they afford this?

I don't know if this is something I just started doing on my own, or if it's a reaction to things people have said to me, but it's there. I used to work with a kid who was an avid video gamer. I have nothing against people who play a lot of video games, but it's not something I really choose to do with my time. What bothered me, was when he started making snarky comments about my travels and how lucky I was that my parents paid for all these life experiences for me.

In the interest of full disclosure, yes, my parents did pay my college tuition for four years and that four years included a semester abroad and a grand tour of Europe, but by the time video gamer and I were having this conversation, I was completely cut off from all parental financial support. I was paying all my own bills, taking out loans for grad school and funding all travel adventures myself. When I was in High School, I traveled as much as I could and paid for all of it with money I earned myself. I don't think my parents even gave me spending money. I've been working since age fifteen, buying all my own clothes and extras but I was lucky enough that my parents were willing to pay for college (then I went to grad school twice and took out an obscene amount of loans).

When he made that remark, I looked him square in the eye and said, "You just bought three DVD sets from me for $60 and barely blinked. How much do you spend on DVDs and video games per week?"

He thought for a moment and shrugged, "I don't know, maybe $100? depends on the week."

If he would stop buying video games for six weeks, that would save him more than enough for my most recent trip to Vegas. If he quit buying video games for three months, that's a trip to England.

I've had a lot of people look at the way I live my life, and assume that I'm heavily subsidized by my parents, which is something that I really don't appreciate, but I guess if I'm taking a positive approach to veiled insults, it means that it looks like I'm doing a lot with very little. Of course, if these people knew me better, they would have seen my coupon organizer and heard me rave about the great deal I just got on yogurt, so it's not like I'm masquerading as a fancy person.

I save, and splash out on the things I really enjoy. I'm lucky now that I'm finally making enough money to bolster my savings account more than before, but just because my income has gone up, doesn't mean I'm really doing anything else differently. There will always be something to save for, and there will always be a reason to keep myself in check and not get carried away at Target (which I did a little today, but I got a great deal on socks). The more you own, the more your stuff owns you, and I just don't want that kind of burden. Save your money, and buy independence.

Extreme Frugality

Every now and then, and article or book will pop across my eyeline about someone practicing extreme frugality. Like this article in the New York Times about the Shopping Diet where people are urged to choose only six items of clothing and wear only those (plus fresh underwear) for an entire month.

There's also The Uniform Project, where one woman wore the same outfit every day for an entire year. She actually made six copies of the same dress, so she wasn't completely stinky by the end of the year, or staying up doing naked laundry all the time, but it was essentially one dress, every day with a lot of different accessories.

Whenever I read about something like that, I go through a range of emotions.

1. Jealousy. Why didn't I come up with that?!? Then I could have written a book about it and sold it for a nice chunk of change
2. Competitiveness. I should do it anyway, I can totally do that, and I'll save tons of money that way.
3. Bargaining. This is where I start examining my life and figuring out how I can take on the project with the least amount of impact on my comfort level/free time. Any changes I come up with also serve to make this project of mine unique and in no way am I just imitating someone else.
4. Acceptance. I will not attempt this. It's been done already, it would take too much time and it just doesn't work with my lifestyle.

I've tried my own version of extreme frugality, which didn't work out so well, but I remain slightly jealous of these people who seem to pull it off so handily. I may eventually stumble upon something that I can successfully pull off, but in the meantime it seems that any major attempt to save money ends up costing me more in the end.

I have a friend who successfully does a no-buy month every February where she only spends money on necessities and no extras, but when I attempted it, I found that all I could think about was money and the fact that I wasn't allowed to spend it. Similarly, I feel like if I attempted the clothes diet or something similar, I'd just yearn for everything else in my closet--including stuff I probably should have gotten rid of a long time ago.

I liken frugality to dieting pretty often, and like dieting, I've learned I don't operate well under an extreme philosophy. I'm good at frugality if it's something I'm mindful of, but an not thinking of constantly. Once I listened to the Shopaholic books in the car on my commute. I've read them before and enjoyed them immensely, but listening to them made me spend money like crazy because all I could think about was shopping. I guess I'm just susceptible.

How about you? Have you tried any kind of extreme frugality? How did you find it?

What do you actually like?

I've found that like dieting, the hardest thing about making the shift to a more frugal lifestyle is the tendency to take it to an extreme that's impossible to maintain. If you vow one day, "I will stop eating out, I will stop buying things, I will live on rice and beans." You're doomed to fail. Sorry, but it's true.

If you approach frugality with a more reasonable attitude, you're much more likely to gain long-term success, and as you go along the frugal journey and become more adept at stockpiling, couponing, doing without, etc., you will save more money than when you started out.

The hardest thing, I find, is going through the day-to-day of mindful spending without really having a goal in mind. If your goal is to eradicate credit card debt and that's enough to keep you going, I commend you. Me, I need a little bit of a treat as well, and that's why I advocate a fun money fund as well as a regular savings account.

There are rules to the fun money fund:

1. That money cannot be used for anything practical--ever. It is solely reserved for fun, and if I come up a little short on something else over the course of the month, I dip into my regular savings account rather than my fun money fund. Paying for car repair is not fun.
2. My fun money fund is where I stash the money from my odd little jobs. Secret shopping, cat sitting, the 1% I get back when I shop at my regular grocery store--it all gets socked away in this fund, and sits there earning (very little, admittedly) interest. Every now and then, I pay myself a little extra toward the fund, but only after I've put money in regular savings, and made a student loan payment.
3. This fund is kept at a different bank from my primary just so I'm less tempted to dip into it, and I cut up my ATM card. If I want money out of this account, I have to write a check, stand in line and cash it.

My fun money fund exists to subsidize my travel habit. You could put it toward a number of little things, if you like, but I think it's much more rewarding to save it up for a bigger purchase. If I pair my fun money fund with the travel rewards I get on my American Express--that's a pre-paid vacation.

So what do you like? What's your big guilty pleasure? It doesn't even have to be that guilty. I read plenty of frugality blogs where people are saving 100% down on a house, or planning to pay cash for a new car--and maybe that will be me someday when I grow up a bit, but not right now. If frugality is going to be a lifestyle and not just a phase, you need to understand yourself and your priorities.

Make a list of what is most important to you, and tailor your fun money fund based on that. If fine dining is something you look forward to most, save for it. If you're an avid rock climber, save for it. If you love photography and want a fancy camera, you'll probably be really thrilled when you can walk in, and buy it guilt-free. There's nothing fun about feeling guilty blowing your budget on something you really love.