The Atlantic, 2016: "Frugality Isn’t What It Used to Be"

[leno...@yahoo.com]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/frugality/504428/

By Joe Pinsker
October 22, 2016

Excerpt from the second half:

...individuals’ frugality at the margins—one fewer latte here or there—matters less as the basic costs of living march ever higher. With that in mind, Ben Franklin comes off as a little naive when he wrote, “Beware of little expenses; A small leak will sink a great ship.” Small costs do add up, but they rarely amount to anything close to the big ones.

The simple life, as Westacott frames it, is something that can be opted into, and doing so is often a principled decision. But in many ways, it’s easier to choose to live simply when one has more money. For one thing, there are the logistical efficiencies that money enables: Wealthier people can afford to, say, buy toilet paper in bulk, which has been shown to save them money as well as several trips to the store. And not having money may make it harder, psychologically, to be frugal: According to research by the Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, poorer people aren’t inherently short-sighted—the very fact of not having enough money or time “clogs up the brain,” making it harder to deploy their limited resources in the most efficient way.

And this gets at why there can actually be a dark side to frugality: Living a pared-down lifestyle necessarily means having a lifestyle to pare down. More often than not, the decision to live frugally is one made by people who can afford to opt out of a well-paid, well-spent lifestyle they have already secured.

Or, at the very least, those are the people—today’s frugal sages—whose lifestyles tend to be showcased most prominently. Earlier this year, The New Yorker profiled Peter Adeney, an uber-frugal father of one living outside of Boulder, Colorado, who writes a personal-finance blog under the nom de plume Mr. Money Mustache. Adeney, who preaches “financial freedom through badassity,” gets around town on foot or by bike—he uses his car only when he’s transporting something heavier than 100 pounds—and he says that he and his wife spend, on average, $24,000 a year. He is not living in squalor, either; he is just incredibly discerning about his expenses, and spends a lot of time doing things that are free, like hiking.

Why isn’t every American living this low-overhead life of leisure? Perhaps because not every American is paid well enough in a tech-industry job, like Adeney was, to save up enough in their 20s to retire at age 30...





Lenona.

[rbowman]

On 12/02/2019 01:48 PM, leno...@yahoo.com wrote:
> The simple life, as Westacott frames it, is something that can be opted into, and doing so is often a principled decision. But in many ways, it’s easier to choose to live simply when one has more money. For one thing, there are the logistical efficiencies that money enables: Wealthier people can afford to, say, buy toilet paper in bulk, which has been shown to save them money as well as several trips to the store. And not having money may make it harder, psychologically, to be frugal: According to research by the Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, poorer people aren’t inherently short-sighted—the very fact of not having enough money or time “clogs up the brain,” making it harder to deploy their limited resources in the most efficient way.

Okay, I'll be the contrarian. Not all, but many, poor people I've known
made extremely bad choices. They followed the same patterns their
parents, who were also poor, did. Presumably their kids were going to
keep the family tradition going.