Most people who chose a frugal lifestyle do so initially out of necessity. Perhaps they decide to have one parent stay home and are reduced to one income, sometimes circumstances require them to cut back, and sometimes they just want to lead a simpler life with less stress and less formal work. Whatever the reason, frugal living can make you always concerned with saving money.
In the beginning, especially, you are constantly calculating costs and values. Later, it gets a little more automatic. You know, for example, how to get the best price on bread, and you don’t even agonize about getting the latest gadget because you know that it just isn’t in the budget.
One thing I wanted to mention is that sometimes it may be tough to practice frugal living in an area that it seen to be affluent. People around you may have bigger houses, more possessions and take nicer trips. It might be easy to feel “poor” or “non-affluent” yourself. You may be embarrassed to admit that you clothe your family from a thrift store or yard sales when your children’s friends are sporting designer labels. But the fact is, from a global perspective, almost anyone that is able to read this post from home could be considered affluent.
Go and check out a post by http://greensimplefrugal.blogspot.com/. Melissa explains all of this very well, how making only $6 an hour still puts you in the top 12.88 percent of the world’s wealthiest people. Of course, I realize that in our industrialized nation the cost of living may be high, and families today would find it extremely difficult to get by with $6 an hour but our standards are higher, too. Her perspective on how we really are affluent is eye opening.
While I never really considered us affluent, we really are. We can turn on the tap and get clean water any time we feel like it. We have a refrigerator and a pantry full of healthy food with plenty of unnecessary snack foods. We can devote some of our day to entertainment, such as watching television, reading or going to the park. We have closets and drawers full of clothes that we can wash from the convenience of a home that contains more than one or two rooms. We can go to the doctor when we are sick and vaccinate our kids against deadly diseases. Globally, there aren’t a lot of people who can do all of that. We are blessed with an amazing amount of freedom in our lives because of our affluence.
Click here for more articles by Mary Ann Romans.
The Difference Between Being Frugal and Being Cheap
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