Selective frugality

Getting out of the rat race, and taking control of our time and activities, first means taking control of money.

So unfortunately, until we get Universal Basic Income or similar, us anti-capitalists can’t just decide money is the root of all evil and hope if we ignore it it will go away.

We live in a capitalist society. Money is the tool we have to use to live our lives. Even people who decide they’re going to live on a freegan commune in Nimbin and weave their own shirts from nettles can’t totally opt out - not forever.

Like any tool, we can use money wisely, to support the way we want to live.

Or we can use it thoughtlessly, and spend it in ways that mean our time is held hostage for reasons we just kind of fell into because ‘that’s the way things are done’.

Extreme frugality is one approach to managing money, and you may get the impression from my last post that I’m all about frugality.

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The #1 anti-rat life hack

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August 15, 2023

In bro-marketing terms, I’m about to share with you my #1 life hack. If you do this ONE thing, you’ll fix most of your own and the world’s problems. (and no, it’s not making your bed every morning). Are you ready? This is life-changing stuff… OK, here it is.

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Cutting costs, saving money, DIY-ing everything.

And that’s correct…up to a point.

Usually the point where you find out I’ve just booked in for a tattoo that may cost $9000.

The extreme frugality and FIRE movements tend to miss one crucial aspect - using money to have fun.

Unless that fun involves living off-grid and canning. I mean, we’ve done that, and it’s fun for a while, but it’s not the way I want to live my entire life.

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And that’s where our selective frugality comes in.

• We’ll happily cut each others’ hair instead of paying for hair cuts, because we don’t care how stylish (or not) we look.

• We’ll happily raid hard rubbish for furniture and anything else we can score for free, because we find it genuinely fun and rewarding.

• We’ll happily cook from scratch, because we don’t enjoy eating out.

• We’ll happily be a one-car family with a 13-year-old dorky car, and ride our hard rubbish bikes to work.

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All of these (hair & beauty, furniture, fancy food, shiny cars) are things that we could easily spend a lot of money on, but we wouldn’t gain an equivalent reward.

So we prefer to spend little on them, and then we have money left over to fund the things we really enjoy doing.

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Like…

• Spending months at a time travelling overseas, with no agenda and no return date.

• Entering running events.

• Donating regularly to charities.

• And getting spectacular tattoos from talented artists.

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In that respect, we’ve been inspired by Ramit Sethi’s Money Dials.

It’s all about knowing what we truly value, and spending extravagantly on that, while knowing what we’re indifferent to and spending as little as possible on that.

And it’s all part of being an Anti-Rat.

Consciously deciding that we DON’T want to spend money on the things we’re told we should want (a home we own filled with nice furniture, two recent-model cars, hair appointments every 6 weeks) means we’re left with plenty to spend on less conventional areas.

Or we need to earn far less to support our less-extravagant lifestyle.

And that is realistically how we’ve managed to live the life we have.

There’s nothing fancy or complicated about it.

We just stopped spending money on the things we don’t value, saved it instead, and then non-magically had money to spend on areas that we do value.

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Simple? Yes, definitely.

But easy? For most people, no. Most people find it very difficult to look different, act different, and to not have the markers of modern success we’re meant to have.

And I think that dealing with being intentionally different will be a future post.

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Over to you - what are you selectively frugal about? And what makes you whip out your bank card without a second thought?

(And yes, I definitely had second thoughts at the tattoo quote - I’m taking it two sessions at at time!)

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