I’ve noticed sometimes that there’s some half-baked videos or blogs or whatever that purport this or that frugal trick, but if you look at the time or math, it’s not actually frugal for you.
What are some examples of that you’ve come across? The things that “aren’t worth it”?
For me it’s couponing. (Although I haven’t heard people talk about it recently–has it fallen out of “style”, or have businesses caught up to the loopholes folks used to exploit?)
Washing dishes manually: a dishwasher is more efficient and saves me time and energy. It’s mostly old people that keep recommending this.
Flights with connections. Flying has become so tedious, frustrating, stressful, that saving money by spending yet more hours dealing with it, just isn’t worth it. I’d sooner cancel the trip
I saved $500 per ticket on an international flight for my girlfriend and I and the extra connection should have only added a few hours to the trip.
Then they cancelled my flight, and I got stranded in another country (Canada), spent over 10 hours in the airport getting a new flight, lost two days of the trip, which were the best days, lost the money I paid for the hotel for those days, and I only get a few days off a year and that was how I spent several of them.
The Europeans and Canadians on the flight got their flight comped. Being an American, I had to fight for a meal ticket that didn’t even cover the cost of two sodas. This was pre-pandemic too.
Cloth nappies/diapers. Cleaning them is a black hole for personal time.
The manufacture of 2.5 years of disposable diapers has a lower carbon footprint than the energy usage to launder cloth diapers over the same time period.
So it’s still a win if the energy source is renewable itself.
What about the difference in waste as well? Talk about cherry-picking outcomes to make your product/position look good. It’s like soft drinks advertising that they’re fat-free or chips/crisps saying they’re sugar-free
Growing your own food. The only way to make that shit pay is to groom a cult to do it for you, large-scale.
Eh, it really depends. I assume you don’t mean all your food needs here. It’s pretty easy in a lot of climates and situations to supplement nutrition and/or flavor by growing even one or two plants. Source: grew peppers, spinach, etc. on my tiny tokyo apartment’s balcony and would gift friends whole plants to put on their balconies/windowsills for the same and now do small-scale farming in rural north Japan.
The only thing I’ve successfully grown is tomatoes. And they tasted weird.
The people who tell you that you are poor because you get coffee at a coffee shop every day. At best you would save ~$2000/year if you bought $5 cup everyday. $2000 saved would not be a significant amount of money to make in an investment either. Personal happiness isn’t worth trying to cut out things you like.
$2000 a year would have been life-changing to me at a couple of points in my life. I was already too poor to afford that coffee to begin with, however.
