People are Discovering Frugality

I found this piece very interesting. It's from MSNBC and talks about how the rapidly increasing prices of food and gas are making consumers look at saving money every way they can. In particular, the piece highlights the small, everyday savings consumers can realize if they simply put forth a bit of effort and have some self-control. A summary:

The "latte effect" of the go-go years had consumers spending $4 a day on coffee. Now the downturn is forcing them to rethink the wisdom of such habits.

As inflation squeezes budgets, middle-class Americans are taking fresh stock of their spending in search of ways to save a nickel or a dime. The result: People are giving up a variety of small financial vices.

For Michelle Hovis, that means refilling her husband's used soda container from a 2-liter bottle she buys on sale for 98 cents. She tweaked his daily habit of buying a 20-ounce bottle when the price crept up to $1.39.

A few thoughts here:

• It's nice to see people realizing that a good amount of money can be saved by cutting small levels of spending here and there. I've written about this before in these posts: Even a Small Leak Can Empty Your Money Bucket Quickly and Keeping Small Spending Under Control.

• Hopefully, these people can keep saving after the economic crisis has passed. It could help their finances dramatically.

• If they had started saving in small ways earlier, many Americans wouldn't be feeling the pinch they are now.

• And before someone says it -- yes, it's important to save on the BIG areas of spending too. That doesn't mean that "small" spending isn't an effective strategy, though.

Comments

[Kevin]

Great - our secret is out!

Soon the entire country will be trading in their Hummers, F-150s and Escalades for Civics and Priuses. Where will it end?!

[rdub98]

FMF,

I have one for you for the frugality file. This weekend, my wife and I went to Lowes to get some paint for a project we were doing in our basement. As we were waiting for our paint to be mixed, I saw several gallons of paint at the end of the counter that had "mistint" written on the lids. Some of them has $5 on the can, some had $1 on the can. I asked my wife if there was anything else that needed painting in the house. She told me that she wanted to paint the extra bedroom again and the color on two gallons of the mistinted paint looked like a nice color, so we grabbed them. I figured the paint was about $20 a gallon or so.

We got to the checkout and it turns out that the paint was one of their highest priced paints at $30 per gallon. We just got $60 of paint for $2. Because we were "kinda" looking at painting another room anyway, that was a real bargain.

If you want to save on paint and can be a little flexible with the color of the paint, checkout the mistints at your local Lowes. It could save you a bundle.

[FMF]

rdub98 --

Good story!

["Mo" Money]

Ben Franklin said "A small leak can sink a large ship".

[Artfredo C. Abella, Ph.D. - LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.]

The only way to survive in this critical economic times is to be frugal. There is nothing wrong when you become frugal even, the hero Mr. Benjamin Franklin once said: " The road to prosperity is as easy as going to the market that is practice industry and frugality in life." Being frugal is not being stingy it is merely deciding to spend for our needs rather than our wants and whims. Today as life is going into the roads of economic recovery we must see the glass as half full of water rather than half empty by being frugal in our financial ways and means. We can only attain financial prosperity if we exercise frugality in our lives. Squandering our monies much more our resources be it natural or artificial is a sure fire formula to be poor. Being frugal is spending our monies in a contrite and cautious ways. We must not waste time nor money as what the hero, Mr. Benjamin Franklin once said. Let us be frugal today not only for sake of being rich and affluent but to conserve our financial resources for the future generations to come.