Inspired by a Pit thread, but not wanting to link to it, let me pose a question.
If money is not a concern, let’s say you have Bill Gates kind of money, is there a point at which your spending on entertainment can no longer be considered frugal regardless of your ability to afford it? Is frugal entirely relative or is there an absolute limit beyond which it is no longer frugal? Are lavish and frugal mutually exclusive?
For instance, in the mentioned Pit thread, we’ve discussed a person’s gambling habits in which the person had losses of $8 million over the course of 10 years. This person had income sufficient that the amount did not cause them to lose their house, so it wasn’t too much of a detriment to his lifestyle. However, there remains a disagreement over whether this can be considered frugal.
In my mind, “frugal” carries connotations of tightfistedness. I picture someone who drives a 25 year-old car, even though they could afford better.
To me, someone who can lose $8m in gambling is not being frugal, even if he can well afford it. In fact, a “frugal” person probably would not be gambling (or going to movies) at all.
I agree. Frugal means working to save money on things even when you can afford better. A truly frugal person wouldn’t have any gambling debt no matter how much money they had. Sam Walton drove old pickups until he died. That is frugal. Hetty Green was frugal to the extreme.
I also don’t think any amount of betting can really be called Frugal. Maybe up to $5.00 a week might not render someone non-frugal but any serious amount of betting automatically stops someone living a completely frugal life.
That said someone like Hetty Green would be considered frugal even if she bet a million a year, she just wouldn’t be totallly frugal, and wouldn’t be considered frugal in her betting.
Using Merriam-Webster online, one quickly runs into a set of circular definitions related to “frugal”. Defining “frugal” depends on the meaning of "economy, defining “economy” depends on the definition of “thrifty”, and the definition of “thrifty” depends on the definition of “frugal”.
Like others here, I cannot reconcile extravagance or excess with frugality. Bill Gates’s house may be easily affordable for him, there is nothing wrong with him spending whatever he wants to spend on a dwelling, but his estate can’t, IMO, be described as being part of a frugal lifestyle. Nor can the gambling that was discussed in the other thread.
To me frugal means cutting a few corners to make money go farther. Things like shopping at consignment stores instead of department stores and buying generic instead of name brand. It has no negative connotations. Rather, it sounds like sensible behavior. What you describe sounds closer to my definition of miserly than frugal.
I don’t think “frugality” is a concept that makes much sense if you have great wealth. What are you saving the money FOR? I once read a book about the wealthy, and one person said (this is in a book written in the eighties) “After the first million dollars, the lifestyle doesn’t change much.” By which I think they meant that you can own a nice house, wear nice clothes, eat out at nice restaurants as often as you like, and go on frequent trips once you’re a millionaire, and the only difference becomes how nice the home, clothes, restuarants, trips are.
To my mind, frugal is things like mending clothes where possible, shopping smart for food and stuff, and eschewing bling.
I have run into “overly frugal”. One book on saving money advocated making your own crackers. Saltine crackers, which cost, what, a dollar a box nowadays and probably cost a quarter a box when the book was written? WTF were they thinking?
I think the previous two posters are dead-on. There’s frugal, which means doing stuff like turning the lights off, the heat down, and buying generic when practical,
There’s also cheap. Cheap means paying the absolute minimum, regardless of quality. “Cheap”, to me, connotes spending a nickel instead of a dime, but that nickel buys the worst possible when the dime would buy something better that might last longer.
Miserly means deliberately refusing to spend necessary money. Hetty Green was miserly.
Robin
I think it’s good to be frugal (of course, I’m Scottish); what isn’t good is miserliness, as Pendgwen said.
One can live decently without spending the world. I think that if you and the rest of your household is happy and you’re not living in squalor, you’re doing okay. Even if you’re a millionaire, there’s room between “going all out” and “scrimping.” There are things that a rich person doesn’t necessarily find themself obliged to do but which are still sensible: taking public transit, mending clothes, and the like. That saves money and doesn’t cause a hardship.
Also, invariably, accounts of ludicrously stingy people mention how they refused to provide financial assistance in emergencies to people who were very near and (theoretically) dear to them, even though the amount would have been trivial for them. I don’t think there’s any excuse for that. For example, one of Hetty Green’s sons suffered greatly, losing a leg, because his mother would not pay for a medical procedure that she could have afforded without a second thought. That’s just unforgivable.
I’m not wealthy by any means (even though I now have a steady income) and it’s a great pleasure to me to help my friends when they need it.