When we try to cut our expenses and be a little more frugal, most people start with the bigger ticket items. The theory is simple and logical. Cut one big expense and it can cover 10 different ones. While this is great, the problem is that we almost always stop thinking about the little expenses because we pay way too much attention to the large ones.
If we look closely, we will realize that we shouldn’t be thinking about spending less on big expenses but rather on small expenses that just keep repeating.
frozen yogurt
I actually never realized this until recently, when my wife all of a sudden added eating frozen yogurt to her favorite activity of all time. Every night nowadays, she is wondering whether we can go out to buy a cup of frozen yogurt. At $5 USD, it’s really not that much money but if we just think about it, we could be spending $150 a month translating to $1800 a year. This means that without 1 year of frozen yogurt (which should be quite easy because we’ve never had any for the last 30 years), we could buy a TV and still have money left over.
Look. I’m not saying that we should stop all daily, smaller expenses. I just want to make everyone realize that the small, repeatable expenses add up really quick. Watch those expenses, or we might as well forget about being frugal.
