The 10 Daily Habits of Frugal PeopleDaisy Luther If you are just beginning to move towards a thriftier lifestyle, you might be looking at the big picture. You could be asking yourself things like, How can I save money on my car? or How can I pay less for that new laptop? These are all fine things to do paying less is great, but shopping for a bargain is actually not the key to a frugal lifestyle. Living a life of thrift and frugality is all about the little habits. Its about your mindset. Saving money on enormous expenditures is great, but it is the small daily actions that add up and change your life. 1. Frugal people use everything right to the last drop. If you go to someones home and notice that their ketchup bottles are upside-down in the refrigerator, their toothpaste tube on the bathroom counter is tightly rolled and held in place with a clothespin, and the contents of the liquid soap pump look mysteriously watery, you may be visiting a fellow frugal person. We dont like to waste stuff, so we use things right to the last drop, until there is absolutely no life left in it. We use rubber spatulas to get one more sandwich from the peanut butter jar. (I even have a special skinny rubber spatula that I purchased for the express purpose of scraping out containers in the kitchen.) We extend our dish soap with a little bit of water. What others throw away, we see as a personal challenge. I dont know about you, but I get a little rush seeing how many more bangs I can get for my buck when using things that most folks would consider empty. 2. Frugal people like to stay home. Going out costs money. Im lucky enough to work from home, so I dont have the daily temptations that folks do who go out to work. First theres the peer pressure. In my old workplace, I was one of the few people who brought my lunch. Each day, the other ladies would spend half an hour deciding where they were going to go for lunch together. Then there are transportation costs and incidentals. Thirsty? A bottle of water is just $1. Im not saying that you need to be a hermit on a mountaintop, trekking into the village on foot once a year for salt, sugar, and a box of oranges to offset scurvy, but you dont have to go out every single day. If you have the day off, why not enjoy your home and your family instead of heading out to an activity that is going to cost for admission, refreshments, and a snazzy item from the gift shop? 3. Frugal people dont spoil their children. This may not make you popular now, but later your kids just might appreciate it. When my kids were in public school, I was astonished at the cost of various activities and events. There were $40 field trips, $5 pizza days, and special $50 hoodies with the school emblem. As a single mom with two kids in school, there was no way I was just forking out the money for this stuff. So, when the girls came home with forms and asked for money, I made a list of extra chores they could do around the house to earn the money for the activity. If they didnt feel it was worth a little extra work for them, I certainly wasnt going to hand them my hard-earned cash for it. They learned the value of work, the relationship between work and getting stuff and that, sometimes, what they paid for just wasnt worth the effort of earning the money for it. As well, they came to appreciate special meals and activities more. I recently took them on a vacation for Christmas and splurged a little. I was touched by how appreciative they were and delighted as I saw them take steps to keep expenses down, like packing a picnic in our little hotel kitchenette instead of planning to eat out all day. When a child is constantly given everything, they grow up to be less satisfied, and theyre a lot harder to make happy. Those are the kids who grow up to be the adults that trade their cars in every two years and keep remortgaging their homes for things like pools and pricey vacations. It is far more loving to raise your children in an atmosphere that encourages thrift, productivity, and personal accomplishment instead of a silver platter environment. 4. Frugal people have productive hobbies. What do you like to do for fun? Does it use up resources or produce them? Productive hobbies should teach something, create something, repair something, or improve something. Think back to the days before television. People worked hard all day long, producing food, cutting wood, cooking, hunting, buildingit was a full-time job to survive and thrive. In the evenings, by candlelight, they could stop and put their feet up for a while. Books were not widely available like they are now, so families passed the time by performing stitchery, carving, making furniture, mending things, and creating items that made their lives more pleasant and beautiful. Sometimes a family member would read aloud, play an instrument, or sing. Time was of value and not to be wasted. Most of my hobbies are relatively productive. Sure, Ill watch a movie on Amazon but, while I do, Im crocheting a Christmas present, mending clothes, or making some small item for our home. I like to grow vegetables and flowers. Chickens make me happy. 5. Frugal people dont shop as a form of entertainment. When you shop as something to do you are bound to spend money on something you dont need. I have daughters, and they really dont love my theory on this, but we shop when we need to get something. We dont just go hang out at the mall. If its time to buy some school clothes, I allot a certain amount of money and time, and when its gone, its gone. I do the same thing with Christmas shopping. The mall is fraught with ways to drain your money you get thirsty and buy a bottle of water or another drink. You werent hungry but the smells from the food court are so tantalizing you cant resist. That display in front of the store has doohickeys that are ONLY a dollar. 5. Frugal people save pennies throughout every single day. Frugality is a way of life for us. It isnt saving money on the big things. It is eagerly grasping hold of the challenge of doing everything less expensively. Its automatically calculating the lowest unit price. Its making things instead of buying them. Its choosing to use your own creativity instead of the party supply stores when throwing a birthday party for your child. Its putting on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. These small daily actions add up to enormous savings and allow you, unlike the greater majority of our society, to live within your means. 6. Frugal people put aside emergency funds. When times are tight, being taken by surprise over a sudden necessity is sure to turn your budget upside down if you havent prepared for it. This is why frugal people keep a rainy day fund and a fully-stocked pantry. Then, if the refrigerator groans and breathes its last, if the car grinds to a halt 50 miles from home, or if a family member needs to go to the doctor, it doesnt put you in a situation where you must be faced with deciding whether to deal with the emergency or keep your electricity on. 8. Frugal people cook from scratch. One of the most certain ways to destroy your budget is to eat food prepared by other people. Think about it: whether you buy it from a restaurant or from a box on the grocery store shelf, someone spent time making that food. And you are paying for that! Those pouches of pre-cooked rice, those rotisserie chickens, that bag of take-out food, or that just-add-water and heat for 10 minutes meal from a box all include the cost of someone elses labor. If you dont know how to cook from scratch, there are simple foods you can start with, like soup, steamed vegetables, baked potatoes, and chicken breast. Get an old-fashioned cookbook for simple instructions to make basic foods. 9. Frugal people do things the low-tech way. There are simple ways to save money that dont show you an immediate return. Things like hanging your laundry instead of using your dryer. Things like putting on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. Things like taking it easy in the hottest part of a summer afternoon instead of cranking up the air conditioner. Things like using solar lights as night lights. The list could go on and on, but by reducing your dependence on electricity and natural gas (or whatever your heat source is) you can save hundreds of dollars per year. 10. Frugal people repair things. We live in a society of planned obsolescence. Most things arent made to last a lifetime anymore, and our society is happy to just toss their doo-dads in a landfill and go get new ones. Frugal people fix things. We mend our clothes, we repair our appliances, we fix broken furniture, and some of us even do unheard of things like darning our socks. We dont immediately think about replacement. Our first step is always repair. Real frugality is all in your head. Hard-core frugality is not just making a choice to buy the generic brand of laundry soap instead of a jug of Tide with scent beads. Hard-core frugality is buying the ingredients to make 5 times the amount of laundry soap for half the price of that name-brand detergent, all the while LOVING the fact that Proctor and Gamble are not getting your money. Being a black belt in frugality takes creativity and an optimistic outlook. It should never be some grim, sad thing that you have to do. It should be something that you choose to do. By finding joy in your non-consumerism, you will be far more successful at it. It becomes a game that you win if you can do something for free that others spend money on. When you feel like you require less, then you are happy with less. This means that you have to spend less time working at things you may not truly enjoy to pay for the things that you never actually needed in the first place. This means that the money that you have goes a lot further and that your life feels a lot more satisfying. When you finally cross that line between resenting the fact that you have to strictly budget to embracing the fact that by being as thrifty as possible, you have achieved freedom you never dreamed of before, youve made the conversion. You arent just acting with thrift until things get better. You, my friend, are one of those truly joyous frugal people that others look to for inspiration. Daisy Luther lives in a small village in the Pacific Northwestern area of the United States. She is the author ofThe Organic Cannerand The Pantry Primer: How to Build a One Year Food Supply in Three Months.On her website, The Organic Prepper, where this article first appeared, Daisy uses her background in alternative journalism to provide aunique perspective on health and preparedness, and offers a path of rational anarchy against a system that will leave us broke, unhealthy, and enslaved if we comply. Daisys articles are widely republished throughout alternative media.You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca You are a girl after my own heart and it really is hard to talk to people today about why you dont go out to eat or that you sew. I just had a neighbor say to me Oh you are sewing. Like I was doing something that she wouldnt think of doing. I just got back into canning and doing so much more because my husband can not have gluten and theres nothing you can buy that gluten isnt lurking in it and I am absolutely loving it; however its probably some of my up bringing Im almost 60 and we did with just what we needed when I was growing up other than that we grew it, canned and preserved it. Times are changing thats for sure. Keep up the good work to make people like me feel good about what I do. Cheap? Count me in, As the Chinese saying goesMay you live in interesting times We are there. Thanks for teaching others these habits of mind, Daisy. Ive always considered myself lucky to have been raised by parents who grew up poor during the Great Depression and instilled all of these personal habits in their children. A side benefit to living frugally is needing to earn less, which also means paying fewer (or no) taxes supporting the metastasizing federal government. When spending habits help to finance your own oppression, its time to change your spending habits. I especially enjoy being able to say that our chickens making us happy is a two-way street: we clearly make our chickens happy. They like to hang out with us when were working outside, and when they want to take a break from their busy scratching schedule, they will come to us and ask for a little lap-time. There is a sweet little person in each one, and giving them a happy life is immensely satisfying. What a wonderful, thorough and educational piece!!! I especially liked the make your own laundry detergent part. We learned that about a year ago, and believe-you-me we will never go back!!! Frutal people borrow books from the library instead of buying them. You missed one out Daisy we frugal people also live on and from other peoples cast-offs, whether they be given to us or rescued from dumpsters and rubbish tips. Everything from bookcases to fridges, past sell-by date food to car mats, you name it, someone out there will be throwing out stuff in perfectly good and useable condition just because they want the newest model or what they already have has the faintest of scratches on it or whatever. Their stupidity or gross consumerism is our gain. 