Frugal Lifestyle: A Beautiful Experience Worth Having

What did you hear about living a frugal lifestyle?

I've heard so many things like living a frugal lifestyle is being a cheapskate, and not living life to the fullest.

Honestly, these are all frugal living misconceptions.

Living a frugal lifestyle does not mean giving up everything you enjoy. Rather, it means prioritizing what you enjoy, your financial goals, and deciding which activities will have priority or be omitted.

The logic behind frugal living is: you don't need this thing, why go for it? The goal is to save while you spend on things that matter.

I think my frugality came shortly after the realization that I could have nicer things if only I spent less on the things that didn’t matter. 

What is frugal living?

Frugal living is a lifestyle that is all about managing resources wisely. Resources here refer to your money, time etc.

The idea behind frugal living is to spend wisely and avoid wastage of resources by staying away from unnecessary expenditure and prioritizing your spending.

 It is about conscious spending and responsible consumption.

There’s no clear path to frugal living. It’s a general lifestyle that encourages people to give up what they don’t really care about to have more for what they really want. Sometimes it means spending more time to save money, but it can also mean spending money to buy yourself time. It all depends on what your personal priorities are.

Benefits of living a frugal lifestyle

There are many benefits to living a frugal lifestyle, from saving money for rainy days or future needs to becoming debt-free. Giving you more freedom to pursue your passions with less financial stress. 

And when you're financially secured, you will be tension free and happy, and this indirectly improves your health and relationship with people.

3 Common myths of frugal living

1. Frugal living is being cheap

This is one of the popular misconceptions of frugal living. Frugal living is often associated with negative terms like cheapskates, misery and stingy. Let me clear up the dissimilarity:

Cheapskates do not like to spend money, but when they decide to purchase an item. They are usually inferior and of low quality.

While frugal persons aren’t necessarily afraid to spend money. They buy what they need, but get it at a very good price. This allows them to have the good things in life without breaking the bank.

2. Saving little by little gets you nowhere

Most people think that people get rich by coming into a boatload of money or winning a lottery. They believe that saving a little at a time is useless and won’t get you anywhere. 

But with investment ideas like agro-businesses, real estate, manufacturing industry, transport and haulage services, stocks you would be surprised how fast your money starts to accumulate. It is never too late to start saving no matter how much you earn.

3. Frugal lifestyle is hard to maintain

We are not born into a world that advocates for frugality. Choosing this lifestyle takes years of relearning and backtracking. Surrounded by advertisements and marketing for products we likely could avoid or go without, we are not accustomed to avoiding purchases. In that sense, it can be challenging to initiate frugal living. 

Once you’ve started living with less, reduced spending becomes more habitual and quotidian. It’s all about relativity. When spending is reduced gradually over time, the cuts are less effortful. Then, when you reach a basic level of spending, maintenance can occur. 

Every now and then, opportunities to buy something will crop up despite your maintenance, and you’ll feel the pull to purchase. When that occurs, it’s important to recognize what motivates your frugal life. Why did you start living frugally in the first place? Frugality is a philosophy and way of living. And many of the myths and assumptions that people carry about frugality are wrong and/or exaggerated. It’s bigger than simply spending less. It is a conscious philosophical decision to save money where you can to enjoy what you love.

How to live a frugal lifestyle

Here are easy ways to live a frugal lifestyle:

1. Create a spending plan(budget).

A spending plan is a plan for how you will spend your money. This gives you a clear view of your income and where it is spent.

I see this as a way to avoid the temptation to overspend. It keeps me on my feet every damn time. 

The biggest problem most people have is disciplining themselves. 

2. Analyze and track your spending.

Tracking your expenses is one of the key factors in making your budget work for you. If you do not know how much you have spent each month, you cannot tell when you have overspent. Even small expenses can cause you to blow your budget. 

There are several options available to you track your expenses. One of the simplest is a written ledger or tracking system. It may be even easier to choose budgeting software that works with an app to track expenses on your phone. It will allow you to keep up while on the go.

A good way to start is to analyse your spending and then cut out the spending that you deem wasteful or excessive.

Once you start recording your transactions, then you can see obvious trends in your spending like how much you spend on transport, food etc. And once you have this data, you can judge if you spend so much on Uber, then you should consider using public transport. If eating out is too much of an expense, would cooking and eating home be better?

3. Plan and cook your meal.

Meal planning can definitely be tough if you don’t have extensive cooking knowledge or are always busy.

However, a lot of this comes down to understanding your schedule and building out time to shop and cook. You need to be able to build out a few hours a week to prep everything properly.

I, for instance, do my shopping and preparing on Fridays for lunch and dinner the following week. And prepare my breakfast from scratch each day.

If you go into each day or week without a plan, it is much easier for things to go awry.

People spend tons of money ordering food every day but meal planning helps you to save money, because you’ll know ahead of time what you’ll be cooking, and you’ll already have your grocery list ready to go.

You’ll be able to plan meals around items that you already have at home, which means you won’t overspend on groceries, some of which will end up going bad and being tossed – the result of not following a list and buying too much. With meal planning, you buy what you need.

Having a good meal plan will make daily life so much easier and give you a host of benefits that comes from cooking homemade meals.

And If yoú're not so good at cooking, you can start by watching Youtube tutorials or googling your favourite recipes and have fun making them.

Remember that cooking like everything else has a learning curve and you will learn much more from your failures than your success.

4. Buy things you can afford.

Sometimes people really want something so bad that they ignore the fact that they can not afford it, and go further to take loans.

This could happen when they try to impress people who don’t care about them with things they can't afford. Because they want to seem cool, blend in, and make friends. 

I mean should you even be friends with such persons? people, who only validates you based on material things and not value? personally, I don't think so.

If you can't pay in full and will need to borrow to add up then you can't afford it. 

You do not need to compete with your neighbours, friends etc sometimes these people you're trying so hard to impress or compete with are dealing with debts, or are in crisis but outwardly they look perfect. 

For instance, if you can't afford a new car then buy a nice used one, same goes with clothes, bags etc.

Is a frugal lifestyle worth it?

Personally, this is one of the best decisions I've ever made. 

Frugal living doesn't deprive you of anything in life rather it's a way of choosing to spend your money wisely, smartly and consume responsibly on things that matter.

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