Frugality FTW

As I was surfing the blogosphere (sailing the blogosphere?), I came across a wonderful little piece on Get Rich Slowly that has a list of 10 commandments and an analysis of commandment #4, which is to be frugal. I am actually the least frugal person I know, and I know a lot of unfrugal folks. After I started scanning through JDs list, it occurred to me that if I show up at the pearly gates and find him holding the keys, I better bring fire-retardant clothing. I routinely break several of them, around half in fact. My car is in truly horrible shape, due possibly to my not changing the oil in 40k miles, and I am afraid if I try to do any real maintenance on it, it will finally just seize up. I call this the bonsai phenomenon because I was given a bonsai tree as a gift in High School and I forgot to water it for around 4 months. Regardless, I decided that it was still in perfect shape so I would water it to keep it that way. It died a few days later.

Anyway, that is enough about my bizarre life. Frugality is something I will try to work on this year and I have already made in roads on becoming physically fit. Oh yes, you heard me. For those people who write me every day asking about my chiseled physique, I can only say that it is becoming statuesque. In fact, I shall be hiking in distant mountains tomorrow afternoon.

I shall now wax poetic on the dialectic between frugality and indulgence, with the bulk of my experience in the latter. If you are going to telecommute, and we all want to do that, then you better get used to managing your money differently. Some of you, the freelancers, will be paid sporadically, irregularly and unpredictably. Occasionally, you may never be paid at all. Frugality is your friend in those situations. For those of us who operate in a performance based setting, getting paid by the number of items we process, our salaries may deviate enormously. Again, frugality comes in handy here as well. The bottom line is that you need to at least have a mechanism to create a financial buffer between yourself and financial storms, which is frugality.

June 1, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized

 

Comments

Leave a Reply