How to live frugally

June 3, 2009 by: james samy

There’s no formula or secret method to live beneath your means. Like losing weight, basic principals govern the change: burn more calories than you take in. With living frugally, spend less than you earn. While old habits die hard, you can change your lifestyle and actually enjoy the benefits money can bring.

1. It’s not having what you want, but wanting what you have

Regularly take inventory of your possessions. Clean out your closets and sell or donate anything you don’t use on a regular basis or won’t need in case of an emergency.

2. Don’t compare yourselves among yourselves, as the Bible wisely instructs

Expensive and new stuff do not make happy families, no matter what your neighbors or friends look like. The ideal American couple with a newer model car, gas-guzzling SUV, three-bedroom home, two kids, and a vacation timeshare in Orlando is probably up to their ears in debt. Be content with what you have and don’t let the pressure of marketers tell you you’re living less than the abundant life God promises you.

3. Think before you buy

Living beneath your means simply means knowing the difference between our wants and needs and spending accordingly. Before you buy, ask yourself these questions:

- Is it necessary?

- Can I afford it?

- What is this new thing really costing me?

You can take this principle down to the level of the coffee you buy each day at the gas station on the way to work. Why not invest in a nice coffeemaker and have it brewing when you wake up each morning? Pennies on coffee beat a buck and change each day over the duration of a year.

When it comes to buying bigger items, splurge on what you truly want and will use instead of the latest item featured in the Pottery Barn catalog. Remember you can often find great deals at flea markets, garage sales, discount stores and consignment shops.

4. Avoid extremes

While you pursue a simple lifestyle, don’t go overboard. Try implementing one step at a time. Clean out your closets one month. Start trimming your grocery and eating-out costs the next. Bargain hunt for that new sofa you need. Don’t rush into a decision.

With anything, you can go nuts and create an unrealistic, legalistic set of rules to live by. You’ll crash and burn in no time.

It’s easy to get addicted to finding deals and bargains. Anyone who’s shopped on eBay knows this. I could look at stuff on eBay for hours and not even get up to go to the bathroom. Similarly, deals found online may seem like ones you need to jump on immediately before they pass, but chances are you’re finding deals like that every day if you’re checking. There will always be another airfare sale, an end-of-the season bonanza, or limited time combination deal.

The key is to keep a list (mental or physical) of items you need and only hunt for those. Limit the time you search for these items to your lunch hour or the time you’re waiting on your spouse to come home from work. Time is money, too, so the time you waste scouring the Web for stuff you don’t need is time away from setting up your new life together. It’s not worth it.

5. Give it away

The fastest way to change your perspective about money is to give it away. To those living from paycheck to paycheck, saving money is at best optimistic; giving is nothing less than unrealistic. But giving could just be the best thing that ever happened to your checkbook.

Christian tradition (and others as well) includes a tenet of giving 10 percent of our income to a local assembly. This tithe is not only to keep the lights on at the local church or to enable it to invest in local charities; this tithe does a number on the giving person’s heart. This act acknowledges that all we have and everything we are comes from God in the first place.

Giving changes our perspective on money by helping us see a bigger picture. We set priorities and make sacrifices in order to give to a cause we believe in.

Giving opens our eyes to needs that are everywhere. It increases our capacity for compassion. “It connects us to the world and that lets us see past ourselves,” Mary Hunt writes in Debt-Proof Your Marriage. “Giving develops our faith and pulls the plug on our greed and compulsive money behaviors.

Giving calms down that thing that lives inside some of us that says ‘I want more and more and more!’”

(Cara Davis is a freelance writer and editor, and the former editorial director for Relevant Media Group. She is the author of Cheap Ways to Tie the Knot and blogs about savvy ways to spend and save at www.cheapwaysto.com. For more savings tips, check out FreeShippping.org’s “Go Frugal” blog at http://www.freeshipping.org/blog/)