Frugal Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: your grandmother’s lessons about recycling and living large.

Want to save money? Drink better beer. Don’t give up cigarettes. Tip more. 

Grandma math. Smaller quantities of better > bigger quantities of worse.

Frugal is different than cheap. My grandma is frugal [1]. She’ll eat one tiny piece of chocolate over a month. She works it, shard by shard, along the roof of her mouth, once a day, late in the afternoon. Over that month, she’ll also cram every ounce of cutting board debris into empty yogurt containers in her freezer. When the house is cold, she turns the heat down and puts on another sweater. And though she doesn’t have the best sense of irony, she knows that if you’re in a place that sells tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for $15 that you’re not in on some post-modern joke—but the butt of it. [2]

Because my grandma is frugal—and probably not unlike your grandma—she’ll bite the fingers off anybody who attempts to pick up the tab before she can. She tips generously—when the service is good. She spends extravagantly on exceptional tea—because exceptional tea lasts longer and provides more nourishment than bagged dust. The vegetable stock she makes from the frozen debris is what most people pay $8 for a carton of at fancy grocery stores. She does not add salt to her stock. She does a crossword puzzle while the stock simmers.

Frugal is finding a way to get a lot from a little. Cheap is expecting something out of nothing.

Frugal means never having to say you’re sorry.

~

We’ve learned, as a culture this decade, that there is no such thing as nothing for something. To be frugal, you actually need to spend a little bit more. Frugal is the art and science of leveraging what you do spend.

Take coffee. Or rather, stop taking it. If you’re taking coffee to go you may as well make it yourself. (Otherwise stay and enjoy the ambience, which makes up the bulk of a cup’s cost.) If you end up making it yourself, know that you can make a better cup with a $10 French Press from Value Village than you can with a $200 machine. (Which is to say nothing for buying and disposing of filters.) If you need more than three coffees over the course of the day—notwithstanding the occasional all-nighter when you’re on deadline—your consumption is excessive. In my experience, those who consume excessively are also drinking bad coffee. There is no point to bad coffee. If you get beans from a place near you that roast themselves, you’ll suddenly find you don’t need to spend money on cream and sugar to mask the burnt taste of your Starbucks bean [3]. You don’t get as twitchy drinking good coffee. You end up meeting more interesting people at the independent places who sell it. Over time, interesting people add unexpected opportunities (ie: value) to your life.

But you’ve only just begun to leverage your coffee experience!

When you remove the grounds from your French press, mix them with a bit of olive oil and raw sugar. And forgo the trip to the Aveda store for exfoliates. Supposedly the coffee concoction also breaks down cellulite. And if you leave it on the body—again, supposedly—for 30 minutes, a couple times a week, it’ll save your trip to the tanning salon. (But never tell my grandmother you spend money at tanning salons.) And if that’s all too fancy, the grounds can be used to enrich the soil beneath your rose bushes. Or as an ant repellant. Or to remove grease from pots and pans. (That last one will save $20 on scrubbers and dish detergent this year—and will open up more space on your counter too.)

And guess what? You don’t have to wash your mug every time you use it either. This is a waste of time and water.  A quick rinse every other day is fine. Water your plants with that rinse, though. And guess what else? You find more unique glassware and mugs at garage sales than IKEA. (If you have more glasses than you need, have a garage sale.) Frugal is saying no to glasses you don’t need. Really, it’s saying no to life’s preposterous proposals.

By preposterous proposals, I mean the overpriced Molson product at hockey arenas and Coke product at multiplexes. When encountered with such proposals, you’re in your rights to bring a flask or smuggle in your own bottle of root beer. [4]  (Trust me, none of the underpaid staff at any of these venues could care less if you smuggle anything, just be polite and discreet.) In fact, actively subverting preposterous proposals is how we’re going to get things back on track as a culture. (Emphasis on: preposterous. Don’t BYO to little theatres and community hockey arenas.)

If you walk into a place and the menu seems even slightly preposterous, you’re under no obligation to stay. Because frugal is also showing a little goddamn restraint from time to time. You don’t, for instance, have to quit smoking this year. But if you consider one less cigarette a day and two on Sundays—416 x 52 weeks—most people on the planet don’t spend that much on food in an entire year. Restraint is drinking smoothies made from seasonal fruit. It’s scheduling a rendez-vous during happy hour. It’s picking pubs you can walk to—because DUI fines are expensive. (Not to mention parking and gas and cab fare.) Plus stumbling home on a crisp night is one of life’s great pleasures. (Life’s greatest pleasures, sex and sunsets and the morning chorus of bird songs, tend to be free.)

And because we’re being sensible, you won’t ruin complex gin by adding tonic. And while there is a difference between a $20 bottle and a $50 of wine, a $50 and a $100, I know few people who can really appreciate that difference.  More money doesn’t mean better wine. Good wine stores mean better wine. Good wine stores—use Yelp to figure out where they are in your city—simply don’t carry bad wine. [5] For $10-15 you will always get an excellent bottle. Ten-to-fifteen at Liquor Depot, on the other hand, is a crapshoot. Which is to say nothing for the way such chains bully small local producers. When you buy products that have succumbed to aggressive middlemen, you pay the difference in other ways. Waiting in lines. Recovering from hangovers. Having your imagination winnowed to nothing.

Frugal is having a little imagination. It’s reading the tea leaves with your family after dinner instead of plonking down on the couch to flip through channels of bad television you overpaid. It’s substituting 50 cents worth of lentils the next time your recipe calls for eight bucks worth of  “lean” ground beef.  It’s planting mint in April, so you can drink generous Mojitos through August. Frugal, in the end, is being generous. It’s tipping well because, when you do, you always get a little extra in the glass, something off the tab, more olives in the martini. A genuine smile in return. It’s the genuine things that are priceless.

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 1. Cheap is overtaxing your expense account on $40 entrees that don’t hold a candle to any of our grandmother’s kitchen sink soups. (Frugal is me selling my shares in your badly managed company.)

2. And even though she’s got a bad hip, she’ll walk three blocks rather than blow $12 on parking. You can buy a six-pack of the best beer on the market for $12. And have enough left over for bus fare next time.

 3. I don’t mean to always pick on Starbucks. (Partly it’s because Tim Horton’s and Second Cup aren’t worth the time.) It’s that Starbucks once came so tantalizing close to a good thing. Or as a friend of mine who writes about business pointed out during a trip to Seattle: “People with some smarts and some money are beginning to equate Starbucks as a McDonalds-type. If an espresso at Artigiano is $2.50 and one at Starbucks one is $2.15, and one is good and one now tastes like piss by comparison…I don’t see a lot of hope for Starbucks.”

 4. The world is divided between kids who get the newest toy first and kids whose moms sent them to movies with big bags of homemade popcorn. Of the adults I now know, it’s the kids who got the popcorn that turned out all right. (Ten years from now, it’ll be the kids who drank tap water instead of bottled.)

 5. I’d suggest that now is as good a time as any to dip into the cellar too.

ALSO: Fiscal Conservative, working class families and Naheed Nenshi.

Tags: Coffee, Frugality, Grandmas, Occupy2.0, Vegetable stock