One way I notice myself frittering away money is not being honest with myself about the time I have/my priorities. I notice this in the both some of the subscription services I have, as well as some of the possessions I hold onto in my life. The reason I started thinking about these things is this week I cancelled two subscription services that I realized I did not have the same time I did when I subscribed to them.
One of the subscriptions was an ancestry.com membership, and the other was an add on ‘support group’ to a course I had purchased earlier in the year. I have really enjoyed digging into my ancestry, discovering my relatives, and tracing my lineage. When I first subscribed to ancestry I was on the website almost every day tracing my heritage and making connections. As I went farther and farther back in my lineage it became harder to find connections and became questionable if some of the connections I had made were correct. This required me to dedicate a lot more time to attempting to discover original sources to back up my connections. This week I had a talk with myself and realized that with my new job, and the added responsibilities it requires, I would not have the time to do the research needed and cancelled my subscription.
Some people may call cancelling the subscription a bit extreme, as I know from my tracking it was only costing me $3.99 a week. While this is a small number, I would much rather have that money going to my investments where it can benefit from compound interest than going to a service which I never use. Likewise, exercising my frugality muscle in small things makes it easier when larger cuts are needed. It’s all about the mindset.
The other reason that made it easy to let go of the service is that all the ancestry research I have already done will be saved and when I have the time to dedicate to research again I can easily resubscribe to the service. Taking a break from it may even allow me to sign up at a discount if they run a promotion on the service, though I will have to read the terms and conditions.
Cancelling the support group was very similar to the ancestry reasons. I am a big believer in not only improving yourself and your products, hence why I purchased the course, but also in having a community. I believe that the community that the support group provides can be an invaluable resource and is helpful for many people, but I knew that at this time in my life, with my schedule, it was not worth it to put forth the money for something I would not be using. The money could be better spent elsewhere.
I see a lot of people, including myself, not being honest about their time when it comes to possessions they keep. Every year in my college’s theatre arts department we would have a clean up day at the start of the school year. My sophomore year I got assigned to helping clean out our TD’s back office that was stacked floor to ceiling with odds and ends and broken fixtures. As I began to clean this area and throw away the broken items our TD came into the office and started trying to pull things out of the trash saying that he was going to fix them. Mind you, many of these items were caked in a layer of dust as he was, ‘going to fix them’, for numerous years.
I do this with some of my possessions as well. I have items that I have kept around my house because I may need them one day. Mind you, for the past five to ten years this one day has not come…but it may. Thankfully, I have started to get it through my head that this one day is highly unlikely to come, so have been willing to start selling these items, or giving them away to someone who will actually put them to good use. I have also come to understand that if that one day should magically appear where I may need the item, between Amazon, Ebay, Offerup, or a general department store, I can easily purchase the item again.
I encourage you to look at all of your subscriptions and see if you are being honest with your time. Do you have a streaming service for which you are paying $100 a year, but use it to watch a couple movies that you could rent/buy for $25 a year? Are you paying $500 for a gym membership when you could pay per visit and spend significantly less? Do you have items around your house that you could sell and profit from, but have been holding onto them for a hypothetical one day?
Again, frugal living is not about deprivation, but about being honest with yourself and being honest about your priorities. With my new job I have not been able to go to the gym as much as I would like as I am still working to settle into a routine, and some of the hotels we have stayed at have not had great facilities. That being said, I am still paying for my personal trainer because fitness is important to me, and because spending the money helps me make it more of a priority as I do not want to feel as if the money is going to waste.
Keep what is important to you and eliminate the rest!!
