Frugality
In money and time
In high school, I worked at a call center. We conducted phone surveys. The building was upstairs from a sushi shop. I worked very little, just a shift or two a week, and would usually order an ostentatious sushi roll during or after every shift. I still remember how delicious they tasted!
All this to say, while I have a frugal self concept, I’ve never been frugal per se. When I worked as a transcriptionist in college (unaccountably, that firm is both still alive and thriving - which tells you a lot about the pace of automation), I’d often get a mug of rooibos tea at a cafe down the road. Much like the sushi, this indulgence was a sizable proportion of my paycheck.
That confession aside, I have long felt the siren call of savings. As a little kid I had a cutout from our bank with ten slots for dimes. It was shaped like an apple. I’d accumulate dimes and, once I’d filled all the slots, deposit my dollar. Once I had work as a test prep tutor, I took pride in accumulating the $5,500 required to max out a Roth IRA, despite my low (and seasonally inconsistent) earnings. When there was free pizza, I really went to town. During the slow summers, I sometimes made a game of eating a raw onion.
However you rate my actual pecuniary discipline, I’ve always seen thrift as a virtue. I’m not immune to the allure of the Mustachians, though I am far from living their ideal. Still, there’s a certain rush in finding ways to save money. Planning a day around free meals, or calculating the savings from batch prepping food, or paying off a car loan aggressively. I think many people walk around feeling like saving money is an intrinsic good or pretty close to it, that on top of the obvious benefits (having more money), one attains a certain discipline by mastering one’s wallet.
Alas, it’s not so simple.
Netflix and Bill
In a process sometimes called enshittification, subscription video providers have started inserting ads. The indignity! Not only do you have to pay them monthly, but they splice your gated content with commercials. Amazon Prime is one offender, charging a few extra dollars a month to skip ads. Let’s pretend they charge $5 monthly, though it’s really a bit less.
The rules of financial thrift say not to spring for this expense. It’s obviously unnecessary, and there are many ways around it. Suppose Amazon Prime pays for itself for a thrifty household, and the free streaming is a mere fringe benefit. Rather than fork over the $5, you can just:
Stop watching the streaming content, to avoid seeing ads
Tolerate the ads
Mute/skip the ads aggressively, or invest in a pi hole or other industrial strength ad blocker
But from another perspective, if you care about watching Amazon Prime Video at all, you should obviously fork over the money. Let’s say there’s one show on the service that you really enjoy, and would watch for ten hours over the course of a typical month: hardly a gigantic time sink! Well, then you have the opportunity to buy an ad-free experience for $0.50 an hour.
Or, to put it another way, you value your own experience of avoiding ads less than that much. You’re willing to introduce friction and annoyance to your life, for less than one-thirtieth of the minimum wage.
Put in those terms, a lot of expenses suddenly make a lot of sense. In particular, things you use every day start justifying quite a lot of money:
If you use your computer every day, buying a better one probably costs you cents per hour of an improved experience
If you sleep every day (i.e. you don’t have a new baby), buying a better mattress costs you fractions of a cent per hour of better sleep
Similarly, entertainment products in general often end up extremely cost effective:
A $20 book that takes you ten hours to read gets you extremely pleasurable hours at a rate of $2 an hour, even if you never reread it
Video games are even better in efficiency terms, with 50-hour games routinely costing $60, to say nothing of multiplayer games that can be enjoyed for hundreds of hours
Recently, I more often feel like I’m spending too little than too much. I pay $20 a month for a few different AI products, but it would probably be rational to pay for more of them, and to spend some real money with usage-based pricing. Housecleaning services are expensive, but bothering to find a good one would be well worth the money, as my wife and I could enjoy a cleaner house while juggling full time work and taking care of a baby. There’s just a lot of great stuff to buy! Roombas, phone-configurable LED lightbulbs, air quality monitors. For many of these things, the ultimate bottleneck is less money and more attention: we had a cool light strip still in its package for a year before putting it up; now it’s one of our baby’s favorite things to look at.
So am I claiming that that little spark of rage, when things get more expensive, is unreasonable? That when ads show up in Netflix, we should be bodhisattvas and endure the indignity with grace? Not quite! In fact, I think new expenses are an opportunity to snap out of automatic patterns and evaluate. Maybe you learn that a service, once it gets a little worse or more expensive, is no longer worth it for you. Maybe you learn, even, that it wasn’t worth it all along. Similarly, there are projects that both confer direct benefit and a certain spiritual fulfillment; I enjoy taking apart my dryer to get the lint out, even if I could in principle buy some gadget or pay a handyman to make it easier.
But it’s a mistake, all the same, to be thrifty just in money. However precious it may be, it pales compared to time.