I’m consider myself a Frugal Blogger, and I am mostly, but I have my frugal sins that I commit. And now, I would like to confess some of them, please try not to hate me! (lol)
Frugal Sin #1:
I’m like Neo in “The Matrix” when it comes to not following David Bach’s “the latte factor” advice, …the rules do not apply to me! Or at least you would think that is what I believe. I have a McDonalds latte at least 4 days out of the week. On top of McDonald’s latte’s, at least four times a month, I sneak in a Starbucks latte in too! I also go to the local cafe shop and drink a few of their lattes per month.
This sin cost me about $15.00 extra a week, ($60.00 monthly).
Frugal Sin #2:
I’m currently not carpooling! I have a buddy at work that I’m sure I could carpool with again (we have in the past, when gas prices went over $3.00 a gallon), but I enjoy my alone time driving to work too much to give it up. When I drive with my buddy, I feel like I have to entertain him, but I like listening to audiobooks, music, NPR, and other things. Sometimes I even think about blogging topics.
This sin also cost me an another $15 dollars to my weekly expenses ($60 monthly).
Frugal Sin #3:
And what may be the most outragious sin of all… We still have a landline phone! We have 2 cell phones, and a gmail voice account… and yet we still have a landline with Verizon? My wife wants it just in case we need to call 911, but it’s not really necesary! I wonder at what point in time, I will start to get embarrassed by the phone? Maybe when we have company over, I’ll throw a blanket over our landline phones, or will I grab them and throw them in the utility room? Oh the shame…
This sin also cost me an another $6 dollars to my weekly expenses ($24 monthly).
So my frugal sins only cost me almost $150 dollar a month, but still that’s $150 dollars that I could be saving for investments!
Please don’t tell my mom…
Would you like to confess some of your frugal sins here? I think you’ll feel better if you put those nasty sins out on the table and in the open!
-MR
Our frugal sin is Digital TV; hubby and son pay between them £64 (£32 each) a month!
They need (!!) it for the sport; hubby is NFL and college football mad and it’s the only way he can watch it in the UK…
Still, it’s cheaper than going out socialising every weekend 🙂
Well, I think it’s worth it in your husbands and son’s case! It sounds like they get a lot of personal value from the monthly cable bill.
My latte has only momentary value…
We go out to dinner about 2 times/week.
We buy gourmet and name brand food. Just about every week I buy an $8 block of smoked gouda. I can tell this is a weakness from my huge grocery bill..and I regularly save 20-40% on my groceries via coupons and sales.
Our weaknesses are definitely food and travel. I wish I could drink lattes still but they wreak havoc on my stomach.
Thanks for you confession.
Sounds like you have good taste! I’ve ener even tried smoked gouda, but it sounds good 🙂
We eat out at least once a week to, but often it’s at chain restaurants like Olive Garden, or chinese/sushi restaurants.
Oh, and I don’t wash out my ziplocs, I don’t make my own laundry detergent, I have cable TV. I even have a flatscreen TV (because our other TV broke during playoffs).
We save a huge good chunk of what we earn, so by no means do I feel guilty about any of these items…and if ever it came a time when we needed to cut back due to job loss or other emergency, it would be super easy because our fixed expenses are very low.
WHAT!!!
Frugal Blasphemy!
Debtors prison for you (even if you don’t have any debt!). I take back my previous “Thank you for your confession”. You can’t be saved.
lol, I don’t do any of the things you identified either. That’s being extremely frugal, I’m just plain frugal 🙂
Scale and balance is a great thing! If you are saving money along the way, so you must be doing something right!!!
What Sandy L. said about ziploc washing, detergent making etc. Though we have a video projector instead of a flat screen (that we bought 8 years ago!) and no cable.
David Bach may be into the latte factor, but he’s also into automatic investing. If you’re on track with automatic savings, why worry about the rest? It doesn’t have to be a contest. Pleasure doesn’t have to be a sin. Now, if you’re in debt or not on track with saving, sure, trim down to the bone. So no guilt on the $8/week chunk of cheese here. I paid for that privilege.
True and well said, Life it too short not to enjoy what we can when we can 🙂
Panera is my undoing. It is so darn expensive too, but I love the clam chowder.
We have a landline phone too. It’s part of my cable/internet package, but I am sure I could eliminate that. As a matter of fact, I could probably eliminate HBO too.
Keep enjoying those little things in life. You don’t have a house payment – you have earned the right to treat yourself, and enjoy it!
Thanks!
The lattes I could do without, but the driving alone is one luxury that I find is more of a need anymore. Especially with trying to think of blog topics while I drive to work. 🙂
I think one I have more passive income coming in from dividend stocks, I’ll feel more at ease with my frugal sins 🙂
I hear ya! I’m on board with your frugal sin #1, though I’m a Starbucks girl all the way. (Though I do like the McDonald’s coffee, Starbucks is closer to my house.)
My frugal sin #2 is I should be riding my bike to school since it is so close (about 1.5 miles), but I just opened a kinder class and I’m exhausted! Hopefully by next week I’ll start riding 3 times a week.
I also have a land line, so that puts me at frugal sin #3! We can’t all be perfect. 😉
I was having a bit of fun with sin #3. It’s just that soooo many people are doing away with the land line anymore. Since we have kids, my wife’s argument is that we need it in case we have to call 911 quickly.
I’m not going to fight her on it, so we kept it. I see some value in her point anyway 🙂
#2 could be changed, but I like it too much 🙂
#1 would be the easiest sin to recant on.
We had to get a landline because it was a part of some triple play bundle. If we had signed up for just internet and cable it would’ve cost us $20 more a month. I figure we can use it if we ever have to call customer service so that we don’t waste our minutes waiting on hold.
My confession…
I’ve only ever bought brand new cars and my next car will probably be a new one as well… Even if I have to take out a loan. In my defense, I plan on driving all of my cars (current and future) until it starts to fall apart. I shop at thrift stores and I’ve never had problems with second hand anything but when it comes to cars… I don’t know.
On Sept 27th, we have a post queued on our blog explaining why it is 100% AOK to buy a new car. So if you can wait 10 days, we can absolve you of guilt and make you feel like you made a good decision. (Buying a used car is an equally good decision– economically it is a wash.)
Ah, that is a big one among the frugal crowd. My last car was new, but I’m going with a used one next time. Most of my family buys new cars too.
I don’t know if we’ll buy my wife a new one or not, since she drives the kids around… I’ll have to think about that one.
My husband’s only bought new cars, but I’ve mostly bought used. So I guess we compromise there. It really is a wash if you keep them for a long time, which he does.
My jobs sometimes come with a car, sometimes not, so I opt for used that’s easy to resell.
I don’t have any frugal sins, so I will cast the first stone… jk. I think our biggest frugal sins are fancying very nice restaurants and purchasing more entertainment (books, DVDs, etc.) than we probably need.
That was pretty funny, caught myself chuckling a bit!
Restaurants would be my #4, if I listed a fourth one.
We do pretty good in the entertainment area though! In fact, this summer I was actually trying to increase this area of spending.
Oh, I completely suck. We have HD cable with DVR ($60 a month), a housekeeper ($120 a month), and a lawn guy ($50 a month). We also don’t make our own detergent or wash out Ziplocs. I only use a few coupons and we’ve even started buying our lunch meat straight from the Deli section – although I will say that I like the cheaper Honey Bourbon Ham more than the expensive Boar’s Head Honey Ham… 😉
The only reason I’m even “qualified” to write a personal finance blog is that we live on one salary (husband’s librarian position) and save the other (my office work position)…
@Budgeting in the Fun Stuff
Ah, but you have a Budget, so you allocate for those things!
That is the one beauty of a budget, you allocate a certain amount of money for a certain purpose and stick to it.
It’s all good 🙂
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agreed – and after all what is the point of making and saving all that loot when not used to live the kind of life you want. everyone has different priorities and we all spend on those, while keeping long term saving and investment goals in perspective.
Yep, it’s all about balance, and if I every find that I’m of balance on the spending side… These 3 sins will be cut quickly 🙂
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I’m in the same boat as you with the landline phone. My wife is concerned about calling 911 on the cell and getting a national dispatcher rather than a local one.
I guess it makes sense 🙂
Although, with gmail talk and 2 cell phones… you think we’d be covered.
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