Ideas for frugal living
With the prices of gas and everything else going up, we need to be very careful with our spending. Our spending habit at present times or did in the past did manifest some aspects of frugality in our lives - nothing too extraordinarily profound, but things that allowed us to pay off our house earlier and have 3-6 months emergency fund saved up.
We bought most of our furnitures and appliances used at the recycled stores, after others have paid for the depreciations. Well, so far they all work fine. For general purpose household items, non-essential odds and ends, we get them from thrift stores. However, we do not buy food stuff at these stores. Also we don’t shop blindly at this thrift stores, as certain items are cheaper at the normal stores.
We drive an old used car and try to maintain it regularly. It does gives us problems occasionally, but we have a reliable and honest mechanics, who does the repairs for us and generally it doesn’t cost a lot. The mechanics likes to joke with us that our junk car only catches a flu every month, which costs a few bucks to fix, but having a newer car on payments will need a major surgery for the bleeding purse every month. We have figured out that it cost less to keep this junk than to buy a better car.
We generally buy clothes only if there is some kind of a discount sale (not talking about those kind of stupid *sales* that goes on everyday). We shop at the warehouse, I don’t buy used clothes though, just have a mental prohibition against wearing used clothes from people I don’t know.:-)
