Intelligently Frugal: Sweat the (Right) Small Stuff
I would venture to guess that most of the people reading this post are interested in being responsible with their money and planning intelligently for their future. And I’m sure we all understand the basics of how to save and plan for the future. The best way to increase the amount of money you have to save, of course, (real basic stuff here) is to either increase the amount of money you have coming in or decrease the amount you spend every month. Let’s focus on the latter for this post – what can we do to decrease the amount of money that is unnecessarily spent each month.
Keep more of your money…
So, you’ve decided to undertake the exercise of decreasing your monthly expenses. The first step is to keep track of all your expenses for a month or two or three and then analyze them to determine where to trim the fat. The entire budget (or as it must be named in our house: the spending plan) conversation is the topic of another post.
In this post, I want to focus on a single important facet of the overall strategy. After you have a listing of all your expenses, the most natural next step would be to find the ones that are the largest expense that can be eliminated or reduced. I mean, why bother eliminating a $2 expense when you can focus on a larger expense and make a much bigger dent in your spending plan? This matches up with the proverbial saying, “don’t sweat the small stuff.”
Do sweat the small stuff…
The problem here is that I am actually going to tell you to sweat the small stuff – well, with a caveat. I am going to suggest that you sweat the “right” small stuff. Sure, a $2 savings is not significant and won’t make a big difference….well, it won’t make a big difference, that is, unless you can cut out that $2 expense every day or even twice a day for most of the month. Making a large sacrifice to trim $20 from your monthly expenses is a good step, but if you can make a tiny sacrifice of $2 and repeat that sacrifice everyday, you’ve actually saved three times as much as the large sacrifice.
There are many, many ways that this can be accomplished and obviously the exact steps to take depend on your personal situation. Some examples include installing a programmable thermostat (and setting it!), installing CFLs, taking your lunch to work, eliminating your daily gourmet coffee, and so on and so forth.
Optimize your frugality…
My goal in this post is not to tell you exactly how to save the money. Instead it is to inspire you to think about your frugal choices in a different light. Maybe eliminating small, repeated expenses will create a bigger savings at the end of the month compared to focusing on one large expense that might be harder to completely eliminate.
Warning: I’m wandering off-topic again…
I would suggest that this technique also works for time efficiency as well. If you want to become more efficient with your time, don’t necessarily focus first on the biggest consumers of time, but rather on the repeated activities. Again, reducing only 2 minutes from an activity that is repeated 20 times a day will save you 40 minutes!
My lovely wife and I talk about this concept often. She is a physician who sometimes sees 25 or more patients in a day. If she can cut out even a few minutes of non-productive work from each encounter, she can spend more time actually interacting with patients and still complete her day sooner.
Life Lessons from Software Engineering…
This is a basic software development concept, actually. When you are tasked with writing or optimizing some software, you are careful to consider what you put into the loops that are repeated over and over again. You’ll want to move all non-essential steps out of those loops. In that way, you’ll do certain steps only once instead of over and over again and you’ll increase the efficiency of your program.
For those of you who do tasks repeatedly during your day, optimizing the time it takes to complete the task could end up saving you a bundle of time!
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