An end of the bread sandwich. Tight or frugal?

 

Hi folks,

Just a short one today as have been tight on time recently (been off all of last week yet still no free time to blog… how does that work!?). And as the title suggests its more of an open question to you guys.

Obviously there is a spectrum of frugality that spans from totally OK and I would argue normal things like:

  • Tracking your spending and/or running a budget so you know where your money is going each month
  • Re-assessing your bills yearly to see if you have the cheapest deal available
  • Not buying a new car every few years on finance

To things more on the “extreme” end of the scale such as:

But there is a grey area in the middle where some people do things that others would think are crazy, yet to other it just seems like totally normal frugal behaviour. This sort of behaviour might be thought of as “tight” which I would define as any or a combination of the following:

  • Trying to save a small amount of money where the time or monetary investment is overly large. E.g. driving 20 miles to pick up an item you bought that cost say ยฃ5 less than one that was around the corner.
  • Being bothered at all about saving extremely small amount of money E.g. a coupon for 10p off, or picking up pennies off the street (no offence J$!)
  • Saving (or making) money at the expense of others, E.g. Turning up to a “BYOB” party without any booze and then drinking other peoples stash

Now I’m not judging here, but I would say that the first of those I just find pointless, the middle one is fine I think if you personally think it’s worth it, and the last one kind of boils my blood a bit. However, I am pretty sure I’ve flirted with it myself and again it can be a grey area.

I think about this sort of thing more than is probably healthy, and it came to my attention again the other day when listening to The MadFIentist podcast. He was interviewing Mrs Frugalwoods 1 (from The Frugalwoods, obvs) and there was a section about her stashing loads of buns or something like that from the breakfast buffet so she could eat them for lunch later on. The MadFIentist came down later and there were none left for him so he had to go hungry. I would definitely say this falls into section 3 above.

Again… I am not judging Mrs Frugalwoods here and I haveย definitely done this before so please don’t think I’m having a go.

But it made me think how fine the lines are here.

In this sort of situation it might help to weigh up more than just “There are free buns at breakfast” and weigh into account:

  • How many buns are left?
  • Am I on of the earliest people to go to breakfast?
  • Therefore what are the chances of them running out?

Obviously if you are one of the last people in the room and you pretty much know they are going to be launched anyway, then have at your buns I say, I hate food waste as much as the next eco warrior! As I say I think these tiny changes in scenario and mindset make a big difference here.

There was one other aspect about this which I also don’t wholly agree with the mindset and that was doing the same sort of thing whilst travelling around Europe on holiday. Look, if you are a student doing a gap year or summer travelling around on a shoestring budget, again this is all great. You can’t get by without doing things like stashing the buns for lunch.

But if you are someone saving for Financial Independence and are therefore by definition probably quite well off maybe you should think twice about that sort of thing? You’ve travelled to that country to see it’s beauty, why not give something back to the local economy by spending a bit of money, otherwise it might not be able to remain so nice for future visitors/generations.

Besides, one of the best things about going to foreign places is trying out the food there… live a little FFS! ๐Ÿ™‚

This is starting to sound a bit ranty now, which was not intended, so I will end by saying yet again I am not having a pop at Mrs Frugalwoods at all here and it was just the catalyst to get me thinking about it, and I wanted to also throw it out there to get your thoughts…

  • Have you ever seen or heard someone do something to save money that you thought was bordering crazy or just plain tight?
  • What is the tightest thing you’ve done that you may have regretted afterwards?
  • And obviously, what are your thoughts on free breakfast bun snatching!? ๐Ÿ™‚

Notes:

  1. Great interview, definitely listen to it if you haven’t done so already!