This is more of a smattering of thoughts than necessarily a cohesive issue, but it’s not supposed to be perfect, so whatever, right?
I grew up in a household with a single mother that was incredibly frugal. She juggled sending money back home to the Philippines, putting my cousins through medical and nursing school, and raising two kids, all by herself. However, this meant that I grew up without a whole lot. In my early childhood, I remember asking for toys at the store like any kid does, and my mom would always say “next time.” I’d find a good spot to hide the item somewhere in TJ Maxx—typically underneath the shoe racks—and then of course forget about it.
Over time, I learned to just stop asking. I’d look at the toy section to see what was out there, then sit down by the books and read to pass the time. Even when I had money as a child, because I had money so rarely, it was hard for me to spend it. I remember receiving money for arcades, and even in Circus Circus’s Midway, I’d wander for hours trying to pick the right game to play, the right game to put my quarter towards. I’d often end up spending 1/5th of the cash and just keeping the rest for later. The Stanford marshmallow experiment would have been my jam. Around middle school, I brought up the idea of an allowance, and I held that $20-a-month I received to the same standard.
In the calculus of life-decision-making, you have 3 variables to contend with: Access, Time, and Money. For most desired actions or purchases, you’ll run into your limit in one of these variables eventually. So to do the thing you want, you’ll typically make up for that variable by pulling from the others.
The thing about not having a lot of money is that my time was completely expendable. Walking or skating long distances, spending my time at football games walking through the stands selling candy, and scouring Craigslist for months looking for the cheapest guitar in Southern California were all par for the course in high school. Also Mr. No-Car-Michael-Coates in No-Public-Transportation-Murrieta-California (an Access limitation) meant that I could only apply to places within walking distance. In retrospect, trying to build up some sort of income stream by learning more useful skills might have been a better use of my time, but it’s hard to have that sort of foresight when I’m just trying to afford In-N-Out Double-Doubles with the boys.
This mindset followed me into college, and my friends can attest to the many questionable decisions I’ve made in the past to save a buck (apologies to my freshman roommate for dealing with me hanging up a clothesline in my room to save $2 on drying). After I graduated, those skills helped me live for years on a shoestring budget in New York City. But even after my income rose, I found myself retaining a lot of those frugal habits, to my own detriment.
The thing is, the idea of frugality that was hammered into my brain had always been based on minimizing Money expenditure. I’d continually optimize for the cheapest way to get a thing I wanted, or the cheapest way to get from point A to point B, spending hours and hours just to make that happen. I spent the vast majority of my life believing that my time was completely expendable, and that’s a tough habit to break.
The mindset that I’m trying to adopt now is that true frugality is about most efficiently minimizing both Money and Time expenditure. When I started to treat and value my Time in the same way I treat and value my Money, the time sinkholes I regularly threw myself into became clearer and clearer to me.
The sinkhole that gets me every time is free shipping. We’ve all done it: You see a banner ad across the top of a page advertising FREE SHIPPING FOR ORDERS ABOVE $40 and you tell yourself “I can hit that.” As I’d gaze upon the $26 item in my cart, I’d think “Man, am I gonna be the chump that pays for shipping, or am I gonna find that item that I absolutely-needed-I-just-forgot-about-it in this store that only sells decorative gourds and socks?” 45 minutes of furious searching later, I’d either have some “useful” random garbage in my cart or I pay the damn $5.99 for shipping anyway.
In retrospect, this is obviously a terrible use of both my time and my money. If I’m on my deathbed, I’d gladly pay $5.99 for 45 more minutes on this earth, so why the hell am I wasting my precious life points on “saving” a couple bucks on shipping? The thing is, I’ve found that I do this to myself all the time. Trying to find the best price on something I want? I’d check eBay listings for weeks just to save $60 on a used version of it that may not actually work right. Trying to decide between two incredibly-similar products? Well, there’s free returns, so let me buy both and immediately tack on 40 minutes of my life in the future just to return something I don’t need.
It’s very easy to only look at the dollar value of something without thinking about the time value costs tied to it. An item that works 100% of the time—compared to an item that costs 2/3rds as much but requires regular maintenance and time—can be an easy purchase to justify when I look at it through this lens.
While money-saving over-optimization can be an easier time sink to identify, another time sink I find myself falling into relates to decision making. The more I think about it, the more I believe that these behaviors often stem from my perfectionist tendencies.
The most classic case I can think of is when I go to a spot for ice cream (shoutout to struthless for this insightful video on perfectionism, which highlights this exact scenario). I’ll always be the last person in my group in line, constantly juggling flavor choices, and often eeking out a decision last-minute (usually with scoops of different flavors, of course, cause I can’t choose just one). All this stress and time spent on looking for the perfect flavor to choose, the right flavor to choose, because god forbid I choose incorrectly and end up with a sub-par experience.
This is a more innocent example, but these habits can have serious knock-on effects in other parts of my life. I’ll get lost for hours looking for the perfect software, or the perfect vacation destination, or the perfect headphones to buy. I’ve lost days and weeks on these decisions, just because I couldn’t pick between 2 or 3 choices that would probably all work totally fine.
Similarly, I’ll find myself optimizing and optimizing, figuring out the exact most efficient way to do X just to save myself 4 minutes on a task. Then I’ll turn around and find myself wasting half an afternoon doing nothing at all just because the perfectionism tells me it isn’t the right time or I don’t have the right items to do Y.
In the video I mentioned before, Chris talks about the 70% rule. When it comes to decision making, looking for the perfect thing is near-impossible. You’ll often spend an exorbitant amount of time—or no time at all if the perfectionism is too paralyzing—trying to make things perfect. So he instead recommends shooting for 70%. The ice cream flavor I choose may not be the best one in the shop, but can I narrow it down to my top 30% in the shop? Yeah, absolutely. I may not be able to write the perfect article, but I can be satisfied making it at least 70% as perfect. Extend that concept out to restaurants, Airbnbs, workflows, etc. and it has the ability to free up an unbelievable amount of my time and mental energy.
There is no perfect thing, or perfect time for anything. But if I focus on both money and time efficiency in my decisions, and remain cognizant of the time cost of my decision-making itself, I think that’s true frugality.