I need to be really clear here. Frugality isn’t the point, the end in itself. Frugality is the means, it is the mechanism for bringing in to my life certain things I want. It is easy to lose perspective and get lost in the focus on driving down the costs of everything, which trains my brain to only think in terms of what I can cut out.
It’s not obvious at first, but a frugality practice is about abundance, not scarcity. It is about having enough when it comes to material wealth, and having more than enough time and attention to spend as you wish. What good are material luxuries if you lack even the time to enjoy them, to say nothing of the subtler pursuits of life which require considerable non-monetary forms of capital?
That’s why I’m going to spend $600 this month - because I want more of the good stuff.
You should know that I am not a naturally frugal person. In 2019 I spent $6,000 per month on average, a number that seems shocking to me now after a year of working to reduce my cost of living. By the end of 2020, my spending was averaging out at about $1,500 per month, depending on how you figure it. I think I can habituate an even lower cost of living.
That word habituated is key. It’s no good if every month of frugal living requires a monumental effort of will. It needs to be easy, thoughtless. I want to get to the point where I would have to really focus and get creative if someone put a gun to my head and told me to spend more than a grand in one month.
To normalize any new behavior as quickly as possible, I find that month-long personal challenges is a great way to get where I want to be faster. The pressure of hitting the goal forces me to focus on my practice much more intently than if I just had a vague goal with a vague timeline. And, per Cal Newport, Scott Young, Anders Ericsson, and many others, intensity of focus is going to get me further than just about anything else.
Without a challenge like this, I’m more likely to have the attitude of “yeah yeah, I’m working on frugality and whatever, but there’s this book I really want and I totally need these military surplus mukluks...” and it takes forever to get to the point I want to be. A personal challenge month is like ripping the band-aid off and getting it over with quickly, so I can move on to enjoying the enormous benefits of being a frugal person.
Here’s how I plan to do it, category by category:
Food: $200. I already proved I can do this last September, when I did a “only spend $200 on food this month” challenge. I used to spend $600+ on food. I average about 2,300 calories per day, and I eat normal food, not the sort that has poison sprayed on it.
Shelter. $100. This one is tricky. I’m a “full-time RV’er”, meaning I live in my converted cargo trailer Serenity, so I don’t have any rent or a mortgage. At the moment, I’m staying with a friend on his land for free while converting his shipping container in to a studio/workshop. I’m including the construction cost of the container build in my monthly calculation, but I’m depreciated the total cost by the bare minimum amount of time I expect to use the container over my life. In this case, that’s $5,000 total construction cost divided by five years total time, resulting in $83 per month. I’m rounding up to $100 in case I need some propane or anything else that might go in to the housing bucket.
Phone. $0. Work pays for it.
Health Insurance: $10. Being basically healthy and earning an income only a smidge higher than the federal poverty level has its benefits.
Transportation: $170. This includes $120 which is the monthly cost of insurance, registration, tires, and basic maintenance for my truck and my motorcycle averaged out. (It doesn’t include the value depreciation of my truck, because I’m considering not buying another vehicle once it bites the dust.) That leaves me $50 in gas, which is about 360 miles in my truck or 1,200 miles on my motorcycle.
Education: $50. Books, mostly.
Random: $50. A “random” category is essentially a bucket for excuses. I’d like to do away with this eventually, but for now it’s a reminder that I can always improve. My $10/mo fee for my website goes in here, and a couple other small things.
That sums up to $580 so I have $20 of wiggle room.
Notes:
I don’t have a ‘clothes’ category. I buy clothes very infrequently, and when I do I put it under “shelter” because that’s how I think about clothes.
I don’t have an “entertainment” category for things like Spotify or Netflix, because after long consideration I decided that those services weren’t bringing enough value in to my life to justify their expense. I almost never watch movies these days - if there’s one I really want to see that I can’t find for free, I’ll “rent” it from Youtube or Amazon and put the expense in Random. Over the past year I spent probably $15 on movies. My primary sources of entertainment are books, daydreaming, and listening to my girlfriend tell me about her dreams every morning.
I don’t pay for a gym membership. I have a hang board, a bucket I fill with rocks, a steep hill, and a broken cinder block that I tied a string to. Also a couple kettlebells and some head-sized rocks. And a yoga mat.
When I did my $200 food challenge, I went from habitually spending ~$500 on food a month to habitually spending ~$200 on food a month. It took a fair amount of effort (and a fairly complex spreadsheet…) but it trimmed $300 off my monthly spend rate, I’m just as satisfied with my eating as I was before, and it doesn’t take any effort at all anymore. I’m hoping this challenge will have a similar result, but with every spending category. The less I’m worried about having enough money to live, the more I can concern myself with the important, fun, grand, and subtle experiences of life.