Frugality

Back when I was getting over a problem with gambling I used a technique I call ‘forced frugality’ to help deal with it. Basically whenever I received money I would immediately spend it on a bill. This way I never had any extra money that I was tempted to gamble away. If I didn’t have any bills due I would just pay them ahead of time. I often paid my next month’s rent at the beginning of the month. I was giving up a little interest that I could have earned on the money but one gambling binge would wipe out all that interest and more. A major drawback to the technique was I could never actually save money just pay ahead on bills.

Now I don’t have a problem with gambling and can save money. The past couple of months though I’ve been spending my money unwisely and not paying down my debt or saving money like I should. I’m going to implement my forced frugality technique again. Any time I receive money it will immediately go to a bill,savings, or to pay off debt. I don’t have a problem with spending money once it is in my savings. If the money is just sitting in my checking account and I don’t need it to pay a bill I’ve been giving in to temptation lately and spending it frivolously. Until I feel that I have my spending back under control I’ll be using the forced frugality technique.

One way to help reduce the amount of money you spend is to have no spending days. These are simply days on which you don’t spend any money. Some will complicate the concept and state that you are always spending money since you use electricity and eat every day then you are spending. Or they will say you could just put everything on your credit card and then you aren’t spending any money until you pay the card. That is just being difficult and I think anyone should be able to grasp the idea of what a no spend day is without one having to go into details about what counts and doesn’t count.

A more valid argument against no spend days is that they simply delay spending from one day to another. To a certain extent that is true but I find that having no spend days does cut down on my optional expenses. I haven’t been using no spend days much lately because I do pretty well with my budget anyway but I’m going to start tracking my no spend days and then set a goal to have more of them to bring my spending down even more.

In the early 90’s I had a job that paid $350 every two weeks.  One paycheck went to pay my rent of $225 and the other paycheck went to my car payment of $260.  What was left over went to my $50 student loan payment,food, gas,insurance and everything else. I used a budgeting book back then and when I looked at it there would be lots of days with a $0 in the expense category. I’m not likely to get back to the amount of zero days I had then but there is plenty of room for improvement.

One of the ideas behind the spread of health-saving accounts combined with high-deductible insurance is that it will make consumers more aware of what health care actually costs and they will make more responsible choices.  One problem is that it can be very difficult to compare the costs of different health-care providers.

I don’t have an HSA but I do have high-deductible health insurance.  This works fine for me since I rarely go to a doctor.  A couple of years ago when I needed to go to a doctor though I wanted to find the one that charged the least for an office visit since I knew all the expense would come out of my pocket.  Trying to find out the price of an office visit wasn’t easy.  Most would just answer “it depends”.  I finally went to an urgent care facility that wasn’t cheap but much less expensive than an emergency room visit and probably comparable to a doctor’s office visit.  If there was any premium over an office visit the ability to come in without an appointment made up for that.  I told them up front that I would be paying out of pocket and I’d like to keep the cost down.  The price for an office visit was fixed but they did hold off on ordering a lab that I probably wouldn’t need(and I didn’t) which saved me a little money.

It is somewhat easier to comparison shop today.  There is a website Nahdo.org that will let you search cost data by state.  Knowing what the average cost for a procedure in your region is makes it easier to haggle.  It still will probably require a lot of phone calls though.

It would be cheaper for me to make an office visit today also.  I can get one for free at my school.  If I wasn’t in school the proliferation Minute-clinics and their similar competitors makes it cheaper and easier to go in for a simple office visit.  If you need something more involved though you can save considerable money through haggling.  Of course, you don’t want price to be the only concern when it comes to health care.

It is often debated as to where is the cheapest place to buy groceries. I decided to do a price comparison of 10 common grocery items.

The results came out as I expected with Aldi being cheapest then Wal-Mart and the supermarket last. I used the cheapest store brand where applicable for the comparison. I probably should have used a different item than the chicken breast since it skewed the results somewhat.  Since Aldi was cheaper on most products though I think the results are a fair price comparison. The supermarket was cheaper on some products and they offer double coupons. If you used coupons strategically you could probably get the supermarket cost to about the same as the others. As a single person it is easiest for me just to do the bulk of my shopping at Aldi.