Un-Frugality
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Homemaking on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 5:57 PM
In case anyone’s been wondering how my laundry project turned out, I am officially declaring it a success. Today I emptied my laundry room floor of piles for the second week in a row, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to keep this up for the foreseeable future, barring any unexpected catastrophes.
(And yes, okay, the birth of our new baby in February is probably going to put a temporary crimp in my laundry style, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.)
Anyway, while I was doing laundry today, I restarted a practice I instituted last winter in an attempt to give myself an edge in my never-ending battle against static cling: I put two fabric-softener sheets in the dryer with each load. I noticed last year that using two sheets instead of one really cut down on the nearly-visible clouds of electrons that hover around our fuzzier clothing when the temperature is cold and the air is noticeably lacking in moisture.
The first time I stuck an extra fabric-softener sheet in a load, it felt wrong to me. I was raised in an environment where our family and most of the families we knew were very frugal by reason of necessity. I’m pretty sure I remember my godmother tearing dryer sheets into halves and using only one piece per load to save money, and here I am doing the exact opposite of that!
I did figure out that my double-dryer-sheet habit is costing our family approximately 40 cents extra per month, an amount our finances should be able to handle even in these troubled economic times. Maybe this year I’ll start throwing in three sheets per load, just to show how *crazy* I am!
All kidding aside, I am aware that there are certain choices I make in my homemaking that are not as frugal as they could be, and which do cost our family some amount of money over time. For instance, my mother goes to at least five different stores in her biweekly grocery shopping cycle in order to get the lowest prices on everything. I go to only one store, ever. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve figured it out that the deals aren’t worth the extra gas money, but it’s not true; there are two stores very close to our house whose sale ads I never even bother to peruse because I’m not interested in making the extra effort to take advantage of them.
I used to feel guilty about this on a regular basis, not because our finances were struggling from our grocery budget, which is reasonably small as it is, but simply because I was thinking of frugality as a virtue for its own sake. Then at some point I realized that I was thinking about it the wrong way.
I’m not rejecting being frugal, I’m simply making choices that prioritize certain things - my time and energy, our family’s static-cling-control factor - above the proportionately small amounts of money I could save by sacrificing them. Life is all about choices and compromises; this is just one area where I’m making them. And in these particular cases, I’m pretty sure the net effect on our family life is a positive one, so I’m happy with the choices I’ve made.
In what areas of your life have you decided that other things are more important than saving money? How do you feel about those choices?
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