Invest in yourself and those you care about at every opportunity. Enjoy life from the proceeds. And never spend to simply impress others.
And value your time. If you don't, no one else will.
Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
71–80 of 211 posts
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#72One thing I do is to allocate a bit of money each week to "lifestyle", This is the amount of money you allow yourself to waste every week. In my case it's around $25.
Situations to use it:
* Treat myself to a $10 lunch instead of a $5 one once a week
* Just pay for parking instead of driving around of 10 minutes looking for a free park.
* Catch a Taxi instead of walking or waiting for a bus
* Want a coke and the nearest store charges $4/can? just pay it rather than spending 10 minutes looking for a more reasonable price.
* See a cheap toy or a book that looks interesting. Just buy it.
Depending on how rich you are it could be more or less than $25/week. Somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of your income perhaps.
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#73I tend to buy in two strategies. Either so cheap but functional I don't mind throwing it out later (as eco bad as that might be), or buying good quality wares. I believe that if you can afford good quality wares, that that will both make you happier and leave you with something of substantial resale value. So it may be a better financial strategy. Compare cheap Target cabinet with "Handmade Amish Furniture." That sai…
This is something I've never understood. Considering that a new car loses a huge chunk of its "value" the second you drive it out of the car dealer's, if you're buying new the only sensible strategy is to drive it nearly into the ground. If you have to pay a wrecker to take it away, I agree, you may have taken it too far. But unless there are obscure tax reasons, I can't see any benefit to flipping cars regularly.
You're probably right, if you're buying new.
I once read about a strategy that made a great deal of sense to me, and that was to buy a 2-3 year old used car from a new car dealer, and sell it after 2-3 years to a private party.
There were all sorts of good reasons for that, some of which may no longer be valid, but some of the reasons were that a 2-3 year old car still had a lot of value but was at the end of it's steep price depreciation curve, and that the new car dealer didn't actually know how much the car was worth, they just knew that every day it sat there was another day of insurance they had to pay for, and sort of more proof to them that the car was not worth much. Also, by buying from a new car dealer, the car was probably in pretty good shape, the worse cars they had gotten rid of, the rest they had fixed up and cleaned up at rates that you or I couldn't get.
Because of that, with good negotiation, you could, in a sense, capture much of the profit the dealer had just made by giving the former owner of the used car a terribly low resale price followed by selling them a high priced new car.
They just made 20,000 by cheating the former owner on both ends of his deal. They don't know how much the used car is worth, but they are scared of it sitting there, and if you know how to price it, value it, and negotiate for it, you can get them to go very low on the price just so they can move it off the lot. You could in fact buy it for far below market rate. That was the theory then. And my own used car purchases showed that to be reasonable.
The claim was that by buying so cheaply a good used car from a dealer, you could sell it in 2-3 years to a private party at a good market rate, but probably very close to what you had paid for the used car 2-3 years earlier.
So... This strategy has actually worked out very well for me. And kept me in some very fun, relatively high end convertibles, starting with a Saab Turbo 900. Buying used cars from new car dealers seems to be a winning strategy.
But you have to remember to flip them. And that's been hard for me to do, in part because like an idiot, I drive too many miles to work, and have no time for selling cars to private parties. But if you're going to put a lot of miles on cars, I think you do need to either flip them or drive them to death, which is one reason I recently bought a low end econobox.
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#74One of the keys in all of this is differentiating between "cheap crap", "cheap crap with a big price tag", and "expensive but worth it". I recently went shoe shopping. I was looking for a pair of comfortable, casual shoes. What I came across were: $50 bunch-of-choices, made in China $150 Boss/Diesel/etc, made in China $225 Mephisto, made in France $325 Ferragamo, made in Italy. There is one obvious "wrong" choice her…
I don't know about Ferragamo, but I do own several pairs (gasp!) of shoes in that price range from a famous shoe brand here ("van Bommel", for the Dutch reading this, and in case it matters). They will last for decades with proper care and resoling every couple of years, but that's not the reason I bought them; I'm pretty sure that after 15 years I'll want something different, vareity being the spice of life and all. It's because they look super sharp under my (priced to match, second gasp!) suits.
I have no way to measure if the dressing up has ever made a difference in a deal or presentation. Or that the extra confidence has ever been the tipping point. All I know is that the engineers who go on and on about how they're sticking it to The Man by doing their demos in jeans and sneakers stand there looking like just another barely socially adapted dude from the lab, while those who dress to look the part are the ones that people come to afterwards and remember.
Appearance matters. Not understanding this, or trying to be a rebel by breaking rules you don't fully understand, makes you a hacker who is only capable of hacking code (or circuits or whatever); and incapable of understanding and 'hacking' social customs and psychology.
(PS It may be different in the US, around these parts Mephisto is a brand for old people with bad feet; good shoes but not something you'd wear as a (even slightly) fashion-conscious professional. Is Mephisto 'fancy' in the US?).
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#75The number of Tony Robbins-esque rah-rah lifestyle articles here has gotten entirely out of hand lately. Seeing this at #1 on the site today makes me want to delete my HN bookmark and be done with it.
Then do it! Believe in yourself!
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you're a "frugal" person who got offended at this (correct) message. >Also, a downside of 'nice stuff' is you have to lug it everywhere. What on earth are you talking about? If you buy a cheap generic $200 17" laptop you'll have to lug it around just as much as a nice MBP. The difference is; you'll have to replace the cheapy about 10 times in the lifetime of my MBP.
I think you are reading too much into the comment. I can throw out or resell a 400$ laptop with some ease; not so easy with a more expensive model. (My current laptop is a MBP that I got from work) I can't invest too much on a bed as I can't lug it around with my bedouin lifestyle. I can imagine that is the case for quite a few people. It's great that you have stability of location but that isn't true for us all.
>I can throw out or resell a 400$ laptop with some ease; not so easy with a more expensive model.
I disagree here. If you pay $400 for it what is your resale value after a year? I wouldn't even pay $50 for a year old $400 laptop since it's nearing end of life. A good MBP, however could be sold three years later for half value or a little less. This is not a bad option for people who want the quality but can't afford a new one (and unless something big changes in the line it's not always so compelling to get the newest model anyway).
>I can't invest too much on a bed as I can't lug it around with my bedouin lifestyle.
Sounds sensible.
>I can imagine that is the case for quite a few people.
I can't imagine this being a very high % of people.
>It's great that you have stability of location but that isn't true for us all.
For me the key is to be sensible with money. If you're getting the cheapest thing because you've actually thought it out and it doesn't make sense to go for the long term (e.g. because there wont be one) then fair enough. Most of the people I know who go cheap do it because they're too intellectually lazy to work out that they're actually spending more in the long term (and conversations confirm this, I'm not being cynical).
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#77The number of Tony Robbins-esque rah-rah lifestyle articles here has gotten entirely out of hand lately. Seeing this at #1 on the site today makes me want to delete my HN bookmark and be done with it.
Then do it! Believe in yourself!
OK, it was a good joke, but signing up new accounts for one joke works on reddit, not here.
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#78It's easy to say "spend $30 extra" when you actually have that money. There were times when I was in debt, and had like $10 on my bank account, and so many personal problems I couldn't handle work. His advice was pointless at the time. That advice is pointless for anyone who doesn't have free $30 to spend around.
My verdict: the author lives in a bubble that he has created and paid for. However, that bubble is also his prison; it suppresses his ability to make sudden changes in life.
I am fairly ok with sleeping on the street, since I've done it a number of times, so when it comes to making a mildly life-changing decision I'll be more confident about taking a risk.
Look, I like sitting here in a nice couch, typing on a Macbook about how hardcore I am, just as much as everyone else does. But ultimately, a nice couch is just that -- a nice couch, and a candle in the bathroom is just a fucking candle. And in a hundred years, no one will care if you had a nice couch or a candle in your bathroom, but they will if you wrote a book or created something beautiful.
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#79The number of Tony Robbins-esque rah-rah lifestyle articles here has gotten entirely out of hand lately. Seeing this at #1 on the site today makes me want to delete my HN bookmark and be done with it.
I disliked the article itself too, but find that the nice discussion it caused balances it out.
Re: Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
#80Wow, I disagree. Starting with expensive shoes. I wear flip-flops, shorts, and a t-shirt to work everyday. I'm pretty comfortable. I don't see the correlation between expensive footwear and comfort. Beds. Yes, you spend 1/3 your life in bed. And you spend it unconscious. You spend about 0.03% of your conscious life in bed while falling asleep (30 mins a day). But more importantly: Relax. Just because you make a certa…
30 minutes a day is about 2% of your life, not 0.03%.
If a less comfortable bed makes it take longer to fall asleep, then that figure just got bigger and there's an extra cost in time every single day.
If a less comfortable bed means you sleep worse, then again there's an extra cost in happiness and productivity every single day.
Now, whether spending more on your bed always makes it more comfortable, and whether that makes you sleep sooner and better, is a separate question. Got any evidence that bears on it?