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Maladaptive Frugality

• aaron695 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• redwood 5mo ago
  Agree wholeheartedly but I worry some will read this and go all in the opposite. The key point is that humility helps make you free. Couple that with not being a slave to frugality and you can live without as much guilt and without a much restraint.
  • fuzzfactor 5mo ago
    Wise philosophy :) Though sometimes you may have to choose between being a slave to something less enabling than frugality :\ It really gets bad for those who can't even afford to reach as high as a truly frugal contemporary. IOW below-frugal becomes a constant element regardless of its current value at any one time, and that leaves the only variable as whether or not any adaptability can be attempted at all, and how much might not be too much to ask :(
• zephyrthenoble 5mo ago
  I was so frugal that I didn't refinance my (admittedly already low) interest rate during Covid because "we were planning on selling the house in a year or so". Oh well :)
  • dnnddidiej 5mo ago
    Thats more of a forecasting thing than frugality.
    • steveBK123 5mo ago
      No that can be a frugality mindset of not wanting to pay the refinancing closing costs (which can be 5 figures) .. I've seen family make similar sorts of short term savings vs long term savings trade-offs.
      • duskdozer 5mo ago
        It can, but the OC mentioned not refinancing because they thought they'd sell soon, which would mean they wouldn't get the long-term savings.
• chromacity 5mo ago
  Most people in the US are pulled into living on credit straight out of school. You get a student loan, then a car loan, then a credit card, then a mortgage. You finance vacations, appliances, kitchen remodels, smartphones - mostly to keep up with friends and coworkers who finance their lifestyles too. A lot of people are in non-stop debt from the age of 18 to 55, if not longer. By most estimates, only about 10-20% of US households are debt-free. Spending and getting into debt are useful tools. But I don't have any friends in tech who need to be told "hey dude, you should be spending more". I have quite a few friends who would be better off spending less.
  • vi_sextus_vi 5mo ago
    (EDITED) Otoh, have a few friends in tech (and high finance) who need to be told "dude, we'd be better off if you worked less hard" (Sorry.. I grew up deprived of data teaching me that "Schlep quickly compounds into Interesting Times")
  • freetime2 5mo ago
    For sure it's more common for people not to save enough. But for people who are frugal and save diligently for most of their lives, there often comes a point where they cross a threshold where they have met all of their financial goals, and the "problem" is no longer how save money but to enjoy spending it. And this can be a real challenge for people who have built up deeply ingrained saving habits. My mother, for example, refuses to replace her iPhone SE with something with a larger screen despite 1) having failing vision and difficulty reading the screen, 2) using her iPhone every day, 3) easily being able to afford it. The idea of spending $1,000 on a phone is just something she is unable to bring herself to do, even though I think it would help alleviate a real source of frustration in her life. My father, when he started shopping for his most recent car (and probably his final car), set out with the intent to buy a luxury car. But again, despite being able to easily afford one, all he was able to bring himself to buy was a well-equipped Toyota. Don't get me wrong - it's a great car and has served him incredibly well. But it makes me a little sad that he wasn't able to bring himself to finally treat himself to a luxury car after a lifetime of hard work and saving. They did a lot of long road trips together in that car in retirement, and I think they would have enjoyed something a bit more luxurious (though on the other hand, the reliability of the Toyota is not to be discounted).
• freetime2 5mo ago
  For years I did this with the thermostat - something I learned from my father who always kept the house under 65F (18C) in Winter. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it even led to arguments with my spouse early in our marriage when I would enter a room and find the thermostat set to a balmy 70F. Eventually I just sat down, looked at how much it costs keep the house a few degrees warmer in winter, and realized we could afford to be comfortable. And if I were really hell bent on saving money, there were other lower-priority expenses I could cut back on first. But I don't even think it was even necessarily about the money - it was more that saving energy and toughing it out felt virtuous to me. Which is all fine, but not something that should be imposed on your partner if they don't share the same beliefs (or if they just get cold easier than you).
  • VladVladikoff 5mo ago
    I love the winter for this. My thermostat is set to 16C at night. I prefer if the heat never even kicks on, it’s noisy and disruptive to have air blowing through the vents. I wish there was AC that could make my house that cold at night while making no noise!
    • insensible 5mo ago
      Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.
      • SoftTalker 5mo ago
        Forced air is pretty necessary for air conditioning (cooling). For heat, radiant is nicer. But most people don't want to pay to have two completely separate climate control infrastructures in their house.
        • satvikpendem 5mo ago
          Heat pumps, they are one piece of infrastructure that work for both heating and cooling as it's a symmetric process.
• lmm 5mo ago
  I think of this kind of thing whenever HN commenters complain about how some TODO app is using 300Mb of memory or has 700 dependencies.
  • Barrin92 5mo ago
    >HN commenters complain about how some TODO app is using 300Mb of memory or has 700 dependencies. yes because as we've learned this year nothing bad ever happens when you have hundreds of dependencies we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life. Being concerned with too much frugality is like being concerned there's not enough corn sirup in our diets
    • brokenmachine 5mo ago
      I'm hoping the AI RAM crisis will turn out to be a good thing in some ways, although that's probably being way too optimistic.
    • wiseowise 5mo ago
      > we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life. What’s stopping you? Go ahead, live in a trailer and wash once a year.
  • kranner 5mo ago
    Legitimate complaint on HN of all places. TODO apps shouldn't be embedding whole browsers.
    • jumpconc 5mo ago
      Why not?
• arjie 5mo ago
  A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now. I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable. 0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • catcowcostume 5mo ago
    Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands.
    • kranner 5mo ago
      "... tend to profligacy" was really bothering me as well, until I figured OP probably meant "tend" as in 'take care of', and not 'inclined to have'.
      • letmevoteplease 5mo ago
        No, "tend" means "incline" here, but the normal grammatical reading of the sentence does not suggest wives have profligate tendencies.
        • kranner 5mo ago
          Ah, I misread. Thanks.
      • 5mo ago
• joshka 5mo ago
  A similar term (often found as a reaction to Amazon LPs) is frupidity.
• nneonneo 5mo ago
  For some, I think there’s that satisfaction that comes with saving money (like you’re somehow “cheating the system”, even when it’s just a coupon that gets you to buy something you wouldn’t otherwise). In some cases, that satisfaction grows with the amount of time or effort expended to save the money in the first place, which is ironic because that money-value-of-time probably far exceeds the actual amount saved. Practically every engineer here probably has a story about spending a ton of time or effort to optimize something by a tiny amount; saving money can be like that too. It’s a little joy in life, and so long as it doesn’t outright prevent you from spending money when you should (or impose excessive optimization costs), I think it’s fine. The maladaptive part is when you start regretting not saving money, because it has two knock-on effects: it makes the decision to spend much more emotional (which negatively impacts rational decision-making) and it can negatively impact the enjoyment of the thing itself. For example, the maladaptive part might take the form of being reminded of the cost every time you look at the repaired phone.
  • ehnto 5mo ago
    I've always found the "time is money" hourly rate comparisons a bit contrived, because I can't actually trade my every waking hour for an hourly rate. The reality for most people is that the trade-off is actually between time spent on looking for bargains, or time doing something else that doesn't make any money.
    • metabagel 5mo ago
      It really depends on whether you enjoy looking for bargains or not. If you don’t, then it feels like you are working, only you’re not getting paid.
      • freetime2 5mo ago
        My mother still clips coupons in the Sunday newspaper, despite being financially well-off enough to not clip coupons. I considered listing this as an example of maladaptive frugality in another post, but then I figured it’s just something she enjoys doing.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• komali2 5mo ago
  > I plan to have fun spending my money in the future, so it’s time to start practicing now. The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want. Within our current model, trying to slip in bits of fun through spending money before that age is getting a poor return: you're trading vacation time, which you could instead barter for more money on retirement, and you're carrying with you a bit of suffering because you have to worry about going back to work. The best thing to do is just push it all until retirement. The limit of human suffering before suicide frequently happens is apparently quite high, so, you can really stretch yourself out here. Live in your car in the Walmart parking lot, eat beans and rice. You maybe trade a bit of the compound earnings to establish certain time constrained things you want to cash in on at 60 like having a partner or kids, but beyond that, maximize that compound interest! I hope it's obvious that this is a criticism. It's just, the more I think about it, the more this seems the selective pressure and incentives in our society are set up. Mostly I think it's insane that we both have an idea of "retirement" and also that we set it at an age where a significant portion of the population won't make it, and for those that do, a significant portion will get to enjoy five years of it, and for the remainder, health is bad enough that maximum enjoyment isn't possible anyway.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    > The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want. This is the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while.
    • komali2 5mo ago
      You don't have to act optimally according to the current system, I don't. My concern is many seem to try to act optimally without understanding how depressing the reality of its incentives are.
• wiseowise 5mo ago
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  • throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    Put poor people in prison for having children then? Should we mandate IUDs for all women and require abortions for “accidents”? Mandatory vasectomies for every man and only reverse it when they are rich enough? Or perhaps we chemically castrate them once they hit puberty? What’s your preference?
    • wiseowise 5mo ago
      > Mandatory vasectomies for every man and only reverse it when they are rich enough? Or perhaps we chemically castrate them once they hit puberty? I’ll go with this one, but for women. And while we’re at it, invent a Time Machine and go back 40 years in time and do a reverse Sarah Connor, I’ll give you the address.
• pornel 5mo ago
  This is very culture-specific. I've seen this in Poland. Under USSR rule frugality has been necessary to survive, but it left a lot of people forever stuck in that mindset, long after things got better. I know people who have a fortune in the bank, but live like they're broke, because they're afraid to spend anything from a "rainy day fund" even on rainy days.
  • Quizzical4230 5mo ago
    Yes! I related a little too much with the blog post. My grandparents were Sindhi and they had to flee from Pakistan to India during the partition. As refugees in India, they had to start their life basically from scratch. Now I get why it's ingrained in me to be frugal, and even take pride in it when there's none. I see the very same behaviour in my Sindhi friends when they feel bad for spending money on essentials like hospital visits.
  • tommica 5mo ago
    Yep, I have a rainy day fund that I never look at when calculating surprise expenses, because "I might need it later". It's potions all over again!
    • bigfudge 5mo ago
      I do that too. But isn’t it true? You might need it later. And you really have to save an awful lot to cope with a truly rainy day…
  • littlexsparkee 5mo ago
    My parents and grandparents lived under scarcity during Soviet (satellite) rule, grandma would can food and store well past best by, save plastic bags and various knickknacks, resisted spending on herself even as she bought us gifts when we came to visit. I think the contrast to US excess stuck with me and I always lived leaner (feeling that possessions own you and your time), though far from her frugality.
• wenc 5mo ago
  I read this article 10 years ago by a guy named Ricky Yean who went to Stanford as an economically disadvantaged admit and couldn’t shake his poverty mindset and it cost him when he was running a startup. Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor” https://rickyyean.com/2016/01/22/privilege-and-inequality-in-silicon-valley/ https://rickyyean.com/2016/01/22/privilege-and-inequality-in... Poverty mindset is maladaptive because it teaches you only money is worth anything, so you hoard it. But in truth time is also worth a lot and sometimes it’s wise to use money to buy time.
  • koshergweilo 5mo ago
    Thanks for the article, I really enjoyed it!
  • oleggromov 5mo ago
    A deep and thoughtful piece, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering at this point what are known methods of overcoming "mindset inequality". Any advice will be appreciated.
    • rawgabbit 5mo ago
      I grew up poor. Everyone I knew was poor or barely getting by. It took me a lifetime to realize over-frugality can also be self-destructive. My extended family members use to trade stories of working dangerous jobs or getting mugged and laugh it off. That was until my aunt got shot in the head working the late shift at a convenience store. She was in the news and the community and the hospital paid all her medical bills; but she was never the same after that. Growing up gambling was a mysterious force that ran through my family. They worked hard. Like their bodies were physically wrecked and they saved and saved. They would often spend so much time at work or at their side hustles, they would neglect their children who would teach themselves how to cook because no adult was at home. And yet, they would blow their entire savings in a weekend in Las Vegas. Or sometimes came back even in debt. Now, I would say that frugality is not a moral imperative. Being poor is not a virtue. Sometimes fate deals it to you. But no job is worth wrecking your health. And it is not a sin to spend a little on something that makes life a bit sweeter.
• amarant 5mo ago
  I do something kinda similar, I guess it counts as maladaptive frugality? Whenever I have something a little extra in my fridge, most often Italian prosciutto, I refrain from eating it, instead saving it for a "special occasion" even though it is, like, my favourite thing in the whole world. Eventually I have to throw the mouldy prosciutto away because I was too frugal to eat it. I'm practicing though, learning to eat it. I don't know why it's so hard, I mean it's delicious! Should be easy!
  • mock-possum 5mo ago
    Exactly the key of mindset that drives me to play through entire RPGs without ever popping a single item. It is essential that I collect 99 potions, and never consume even 1.
    • ornornor 5mo ago
      I have the same :(
    • wing-_-nuts 5mo ago
      I forget what game it was, but I came to a point in the game where there was just an insane difficulty spike. Like I literally could not progress, and I couldn't change difficulties without starting a new game. Then I remembered I had these strong health potions I'd carried through most of the game. I burned through my entire stockpile but I made it! It felt like the devs were saying 'no, you idiot, we put those items in the game for a reason, use them!'
      • jumpconc 5mo ago
        In many games with increasing difficulty, this will just get you stuck on the next fight, and now without any potions. That's why people don't do it.
  • steveBK123 5mo ago
    This is a pretty common issue, I have to remind my spouse to just finish stuff. Eat it, and if it was so good.. buy more at the grocery next time. One could try to reframe it that having it sit in the fridge going bad is a waste of fridge space/electricity/food/mental energy and unnecessary personal suffering.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• coalstartprob 5mo ago
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• w10-1 5mo ago
  Agreed - I find I spend almost the same time on small decisions as large, and let the default (subscriptions, extra cars, storage) ride. That's turning the decision into a drama that befalls you (and avoiding those that don't). Or you find yourself down or up become cheap or profligate. So, what big spending is adaptive? Better to drive decisions objectively based on future value. Some scenarios: - It lasts a long time, and you'll need to do it anyway. Best to get it early and enjoy it longer - for iPhones, cars, houses, marriage... - It lasts a long time and you use it daily. Always pay for what you'll be glad to have: good socks, a powerful computer, a nice view. - Your beloveds needs to know if you care more about money or them. Choose them. - Something expresses your values: you appreciate an artist's work, so you pay good money for it. Some panhandler is stoic, so you give him a hand. (Just be careful about posturing.) Another mindset is to think of your money as family (writ large) money, and invest in the future of family or friends. It's as much a vote of confidence as an injection of cash, and it helps you detach from the needy instrumentality of the money to consider what's best for their future. That's the weirder phenomenon: trillions held by baby boomers until they die (just in case), while their progeny waste time in terrible jobs and narrow circumstances for lack of investment. That's maladaptive hoarding.
• MichaelRo 5mo ago
  >> I have a hard time spending, to the point where I would often procrastinate on buying things that I know I’ll need in the future. Well, what I noticed is that I go to great efforts to avoid buying me some stuff that would make my life easier (say an electric bike or a better computer). Month starts, I get my paycheck and every day I fend off the desire to buy the stuff I want/need. And then come the bills. Like some surprise "regularization" gas or electricity bill that costs more than the item I didn't buy. If it's not that, some darn thing breaks and needs repairs. And if it's not that, kid has to go in some school trip, there's some birthday or wedding we have to attend, someone asks me to lend them some money (coze they know I save) or some other event happens and requires a ca$h infusion. By the end of the month, money's gone and I haven't got nothing. At some point working just to pay bills and expenses makes Jack a dull boy. So funk it, I buy that stuff AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH. And when shit arrives demanding money I can truthfully say: "I don't have any money left". But at least I got the thing, opposed to neither money, nor item.
• solatic 5mo ago
  The most helpful tool here, I've found, is maintaining a personal finances spreadsheet. It's one thing, without a spreadsheet, to have the emotion of "I'm not going to have enough and I need to save more to make sure I have enough." I'd argue it's even evolutionary; we want to make sure we have enough to get through the winter we know is coming. It's quite another when your spreadsheet shows you saved X, your monthly cost of living is Y, and therefore you have enough money saved, even if your income went to zero and you made no changes to your lifestyle, to last you for Z years. Being able to take YouTube University rule-of-thumb advice like "of your take-home pay, use 65% for necessities, 15% for long-term savings, 20% for enjoyment" and seeing how much money that is per month for you in your personal circumstances, along with rules of thumb on things like what ratio you should have achieved by which age on net worth-to-income ratio (1x by 30, 2x by 35, 3x by 40, etc.) and seeing what your personal actual ratio is, to get a sense of benchmarking yourself. I mean, the influencers could be totally full of shit, but it doesn't matter. Getting actual numbers for where you are, plus getting "generic" advice that you know wasn't directed at you personally, and seeing how those numbers make you feel, can do a lot to either tell you "you don't need to be so frugal anymore" or "yep, your emotions are totally justified, keep saving".
  • brailsafe 5mo ago
    I need to get into building a PF spreadsheet and getting things in better order, but fwiw the way I sometimes frame the question of whether or not it's "okay" for me to buy something is 1) Will spending the money compromise or help my ability to pursue something else I want to do, based on the price and utility, 2) Could I buy 20 of them? Even better if I could buy 20 without tangibly hurting my wallet. If you can buy 20, 1 is probably fine, don't stress too much.
  • ansgri 5mo ago
    That is good if you can count on your cost of living being predictable. It's not for many people, even for relatively well-off ones: you may earn a lot for your area but being an immigrant without a permanent enough status in your current country, and your home country which you always have a right to return to may be unsafe or highly undesirable for whatever reason. So you need to consider the emergency of moving somewhere in a political and legal climate not known in advance. Thus it becomes a more difficult choice what proportion to bet on stability of the current living situation, and what on long-term savings for emergencies which look quite probable but still unmeasurable. And the latter is complicated by absence of reliable and relatively liquid investment opportunities. All in all, fun to be from a sanctioned country.
• swiftcoder 5mo ago
  Fellow frugalite here, and man, is it hard to break the habit of agonising over every purchase. Took me nearly 20 years in tech before I convinced myself I could justify just buying a new laptop every 5 years, and not sit around waiting for things to compile on the old one - and thats an item that is both essential to my work and also tax deductible. The agonising is even worse with items that are technically non-essential (but would make life better)
• TZubiri 5mo ago
  I see this with devs all the time, devs that want to pitch their startup and use a subdomain like .vercel.app that gets blocked after 2 weeks
• Havoc 5mo ago
  > What I took away: eating at a good restaurant was bad, taking out cheap food was good because it saved money. Any sort of morality like framing around it is likely to lead to issues imo. The closer you can get to an analytical approach the better I think - can I afford it, is it good value for money, is it useful/furthers my goals etc
  • terrabitz 5mo ago
    It's really a shame. I grew up in a frugal household that venerated Dave Ramsey, and there was a ton of moralizing of finances that didn't need to be moralized. Stuff like "debt is always evil, buying frivolous things like fancy coffees is stupid", etc. There are unfortunately a lot of people that base their spending and saving decisions not on what they actually value or what their goals are. Rather, they base them on fear of breaking the moral rules.
    • jjice 5mo ago
      FWIW the Ramsey folks (whom I haven't really listened to in a few years) are cool with buying "frivolous things like fancy coffees" if you're out of debt. Not saying that's right or wrong (I personally think you can have a damn coffee), but their general philosophy is that if you're out of debt and are saving whatever percent of your income, do whatever you want.
    • wat10000 5mo ago
      Ramsey is for people who can't be analytic with their money, and need some moralizing to counteract the "I can afford it, it's less than the remaining limit on my credit card" impulse.
• lstodd 5mo ago
  There is frugality and there is taking inflation into account when deciding on save vs loan. For the last many years it was net profit to take loans, spend and pay them back later because inflation meant you got more goods/services that way. On the other hand keeping cash/savings over some smallish buffer where opportunity costs dominate is/was always net loss. That not touching US-specific stuff like insane student loans, credit card terms or healthcare.
  • kristianp 5mo ago
    Inflation has caused my savings and investments to take a hit in real value. Now with oil prices we're getting another inflation hit.
  • bdangubic 5mo ago
    > For the last many years it was net profit to take loans, spend and pay them back later because inflation meant you got more goods/services that way. this would he true if the wages kept up with inflation and of course that as we know well has not even remotely been the case
• markvdb 5mo ago
  In this subject area, I recommend Jacob Lund Fisker[0]'s Early Retirement Extreme book [1]. Don't let the title fool you. The man has a surprisingly level-headed and refreshing approach to spending. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker [1] https://archive.org/details/earlyretiremente0000fisk https://archive.org/details/earlyretiremente0000fisk
• steveBK123 5mo ago
  My spouse and I both grew up in this kind of household. Interesting to see how we & our siblings all responded, some followed suit and others had opposite reaction. I think some people are good at frugality and some are good at income maximizing, and few are good at both. I turned into an income maximizer.. started working at 14.. post college left home, took a high stakes career and hopped to new opportunities proactively. Response to not wanting anyone to be able to control me via money. For my spouse & I it was a reaction to 1) having a lot of childhood of consequences/regrets of over-frugality like frozen pipes bursting, parents lamenting not going back home for 10 years during which their own parents died, asking for a single $10 toy for birthday and having them buy a knock-off instead, etc. 2) a reaction to teenage parental control via money like when I was moving to the big city for my job and the housing deposit was due before the hiring company was going to wire me my housing stipend, and my parents refused to float me $1k for a month (and then gifted me more than this as a graduation gift a few months later). So I think you want to instill a respect for money in your children but not a fear.
• cineticdaffodil 5mo ago
  If a society does not thrive its advice and morals ar obviosly less valueable. So if a society tithers on the brink of civil war or is stuck in a theo cracy. Its advice on frugality is less valueable.
• RickJWagner 5mo ago
  Spending money sparingly is like reducing weight in an automobile. A car will get better gas mileage, go faster, break less often, and be more responsive with less weight. So it is with spending. When you spend less, you can retire earlier, your finances are more secure, you feel less pressure and stress, etc. You have more flexibility in the kinds of jobs you can take. Perhaps best of all, you end up accumulating less stuff, and less complicated things, which makes your life simpler. Frugality doesn’t get the flashy press that consumerism does, but it’s a winning life strategy.
  • catlogbindiff 5mo ago
    Retiring early is a single guy internet myth. If you have a family, forget it. If you have a health condition, forget it. If you don’t have low risk investments, forget it. In the US health care can reset your bank account in the blink of an eye which is why so many many people in tech work until Medicare kicks in. Early retirement with a family is at least 10 mil in cash. Better enjoy your job because you’ll be doing it for a long time like 98% of Americans.
    • Mezzie 5mo ago
      If you're truly fortunate, you can end up with an expensive chronic but not deadly condition that penalizes you for saving and having assets. Your healthcare isn't an emergency, so if it isn't paid for, you don't get it. But if you have any money, no Medicaid for you. Instead, you get to drain your accounts until you're impoverished and then they'll help you.
      • giardini 5mo ago
        Dear Mezzie, (from your profile): "Live fast. Die young. Don't give HN an email." I like the "Live fast", not so much the "Die young", but why not "give HN an email"?
        • Mezzie 5mo ago
          Without an email, the account can't be retrieved if I forget the login information. It's a reminder not to grow too attached to the account and that all things are ephemeral.
• terrabitz 5mo ago
  This is one of the reasons I like YNAB (both their app and their method). One of their core principles is to align your spending -- including future spending, aka saving -- with your values. Spending on the wrong things isn't good, but neither is saving without clear purpose. My wife and I both came from fairly frugal households growing up, so frugality is often our default. It's been a helpful exercise to periodically ask ourselves "what do we actually value, and what tradeoffs should we make", then update our plan to match.
  • the_snooze 5mo ago
    This is really the heart of it. Understand what matters to you, and align your finances (and decisions as a whole) with that. If you optimize for some external metric without examining your own values, you're basically adrift.
• anticorporate 5mo ago
  I struggle with this. I feel so guilty for replacing my four year old phone this week, even though my old phone has had hardware issues for more than a year. There wasn't really a puritanical element for me, it seems to be just from growing below the poverty line. The flip side of it is I've accidentally joined the FIRE movement. Making a moderate tech salary for most of my time since graduating college but feeling guilty about spending means I'm now in my early 40s and don't really have to work anymore, or at least, could comfortably take any job I want without worrying about what the pay rate is. I don't really know how to feel about that. After my last job in tech I took about a half a year off before realizing I also felt guilty about not working, and took a job I wanted. But there are also weird feelings from working because you want to at a workplace where most everyone else is working because they have to.
  • adithyassekhar 5mo ago
    You know there’s an upcoming generation of developers who are so jealous of you? Not your fault or anything. We managed to make the latter irrelevant or by no means a high earner. Everything is expensive, tech took over all the jobs, now tech itself has found ways to end those jobs. You either have to be a medical professional/media person now to live without worry.
    • insom 5mo ago
      I'm in the same situation as GP and while I think you're right (we're some of the last well paid software developers who aren't also founders) it doesn't help with feeling less guilty! It's a weird kind of guilt because it's not like we individually created these economic conditions; we were just there at the right time to take advantage of them before they were gone. I tend to think of this as "useless guilt" (vs. guilt about taking a transatlantic flight or other high-impact activity -- which I still do, but I think that guilt is societally useful)
    • anticorporate 5mo ago
      > You know there’s an upcoming generation of developers who are so jealous of you? Not your fault or anything. I do, and and I think that's part of the reason I feel guilty about not working. Why should I get an easy ride when other people did not? I suppose there's some small element of worrying that I'm wrong about my future needs . I know I have some skills that are still useful and I can put them to work now, but I'm less sure I'd be able to do that in five years. That part of it is probably not maladaptive, however, even though it probably comes from the same place of growing up with very little.
• engineer_22 5mo ago
  I am a consulting engineer serving small communities in Central New York. Ostensibly my job is to design construction projects to fix a problem, but most of my job is actually helping the community figure out how to pay for the fix. My greatest frustration is Maladaptive Frugality. There are whole communities with this mindset, and it takes a lot of effort to communicate the reality to the town/village board that they're losing money by trying to save money. I've invested a lot of work into projects which come to naught because the decision makers can't imagine a future where spending money saves them money. "Tripping over dimes to pick up pennies" observed one old farmer. "I'm too poor to afford cheap tools" say the wiser tradesmen.
  • Mezzie 5mo ago
    That reminds me of the roads in my city. They're disgusting. The reason is because the city charter mandates they have to take the cheapest bid. Of course the quality is crap and none of the fixes last! Fortunately, we just changed that, so hopefully it will get better.
    • engineer_22 5mo ago
      If you'll allow me the grace to explain, I think the issue is more complicated than it seems at first glance. Procurement policy in USA is usually "lowest responsible bid", meaning you can reasonably expect that the contractor can complete the work without going bankrupt. With respect to the work itself, a competent civil engineer will provide for appropriate materials and handling to ensure the contractors are supplying a substantially similar product. Most repaving jobs in the city go no further than resurfacing - remove the top 1-2 inches and install 1.5 - 2.5 inches new. This treats the symptoms, not the problem! I'm assuming you're in a wet climate. The problem is the subbase is reflecting strain through the road surface, initiating cracks which are openned further by weather. To noticeably improve, you'd have to remove the subbase to great depth and replace with engineered fill, multiple layers of geotextile, storm drainage improvements, then a full depth asphalt section. Not only are the materials for this work expensive, but it represents a different order of magnitude of labor, the number 1 cost driver. Sometimes the tax base is so weakened that the city cannot even keep up with resurfacing and you end up with roads like you describe. The economics on this are difficult to assess because everyone knows the roads are forcing more car repairs and accidents, and generally rob you of bliss... but the calculus to improve the roads via property taxes is not straight forward, i.e. it's political.
• Drdiamond 5mo ago
  The internet is amazing, I like to watch videos from developing nations, where people live on a fraction of western budgets... what strikes me is the happy, free people I see. That's hard to fake.
  • tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
    Presumably that will change once they start watching videos of people living on Western budgets.
• jjice 5mo ago
  I had a very similar experience and still catch myself on occasion. Even with my "higher" spending, it's still lower than most. I hadn't realized, but I had associated the act of not spending money as righteous, and spending money as bad. I think it was Ramit Sethi who said something along the lines of "spending money isn't inherently moral or immoral", and that was something that resonated with me. I had to pull myself out of the implicit mindset of "spending money should cause guilt". It's been very nice. And to clarify examples of this: I no longer hesitate purchasing a drip coffee on Saturday afternoon, or on getting a beer with some friends at the brewery.
• Nifty3929 5mo ago
  To me this is so much about where you focus your attention. Even from a purely financial perspective. Mental space dedicated to watching your expenses is space you aren't using to improve your top-line. Some people are very proud of being frugal, spending time optimizing expenses - while earning far less than they could otherwise because they don't spend any mental energy on how to earn more. Meanwhile others are spendthrifts, but allocate a lot more energy to earning more - and do earn more. Stay focused on earning more money and don't spend any more time than you need to watching expenses - just so long as you save/ivnest plenty. You'll enjoy life a lot more.
  • watwut 5mo ago
    > Some people are very proud of being frugal, spending time optimizing expenses - while earning far less than they could otherwise because they don't spend any mental energy on how to earn more. This claim really requieres some kind of proof. Because I have never seen this in real life - a person who realistically could earn more if they spent less time trying to save money. It sounds like a made up dichotomy or an extremely rare situation. I met people who earn a lot and save absurdly lot. Or earn a lot and waste it all. Or dont ear and either save or not. But, there being realistic path to bigger earnings that is ignored because of spending too much saving is a corner case.
  • pphysch 5mo ago
    There's a substantial difference between "reducing what you would otherwise spend" and "not spending / defaulting to the minimum". The latter mindset is less about active money management and more about completely avoiding unnecessary consumption.
  • super3ta 5mo ago
    This I went broke ordering pizza 4 nights a week to fuel my 6-hour-a-night stretches of job searching and upskilling. But after 3 months, I doubled my income, at the cost of a few pounds of stomach fat.
  • neogodless 5mo ago
    > Mental space dedicated to watching your expenses is space you aren't using to improve your top-line. Not inaccurate, but you have "24 hours in a day". Even if you spend 1 hour on frugality, it's not like you spend 23 on "increasing your income." Why not both? > Stay focused on earning more money > You'll enjoy life a lot more Needs sources. We know that earning more is helpful up to a point, but it reaches a point of diminishing returns. Similarly spending money can help you enjoy life, but we tend to be bad at predicting how happy any particular spending will make us. Learning this lesson and evolving our spending so that we do "enjoy life a lot more" can be well worth the time invested, even if it doesn't help us earn more.
• errantmind 5mo ago
  You can be frugal without spending a lot of mental energy on your expenses. It seems contradictory but it is possible to 'live' frugally without thinking about money all that much (assuming you aren't broke and have positive cash flow). The real challenge is escaping consumerism as a means of (superficial) fulfillment. > When you default to the lowest cost option without considering the drawbacks, procrastinating or hesitating on spending[...] This is terrible advice, one of the easiest ways to be frugal is not to be overly attached and to defer spending.
• ge96 5mo ago
  Frugality I've been feeling guilty for buying 2 red bulls (sugar free) at work everday and my salad... a salad that costs $5 (although I can put many toppings eg. meat on it) vs. buying a $3 bag of leaves and make my own salad. I should put every dollar I have towards debt that would be ideal... but it's that time thing too, don't have to prep my lunch/carry an extra bag. Also can just make more money. Like my car, should I not have bought an $800 RD and $1K on tires or just put that towards the car loan... idk. I enjoy a fast car though.
• djgel 5mo ago
  100% agree. My wife is doing her best to change this habit haha.
• tsylba 5mo ago
  Frugality is a state of mind, feeling guilty about it is not a frugality problem more than a labeling one. It's the same for climate change, a lot of people want to feel good about themselves labeling them ecological when they're not capable to act on it (eating less meat, avoiding to take an airplane to travel, ..etc). They feel guilty not because of 'it' but because they don't want to act about something they reason is the morally good choice. It's performative virtue signalling. As a general rule I don't think you can label yourself as anything (eg. a liberal, an anarchist, a frugal, a skeptic, a believer, a punk, ..etc). You either are or you aren't. Chasing a label and an identity is the best way to never be it like a perfume wearing you rather than you wearing it.
• randusername 5mo ago
  Maladaptive frugality is just one of many "maladaptive X" where X is something that we overgeneralized in childhood. I think it is especially easy to overgeneralize frugality because, either because it is taboo or conventionally boring, parents don't always share the situational details that prompt their behavior. In my life I internalized "everyone should rule the thermostat with an iron fist always" when the more complete picture would have been "because we're cash-strapped in the 2008 recession and our house is old and leaky we're ruling the thermostat with an iron fist for now".
  • themafia 5mo ago
    I fixed it by simply placing a value on my own time. When I started I figured my time was worth at least $50/hr. Spending an hour trying to save less than $50 is an absolute loss, recognizing that, my behavior changed easily.
    • bellowsgulch 5mo ago
      Paradoxically, this works less and less the higher your income is. If you value your time at, say $200/hr and you work with other people who claim their billable labor is also close to $200/hr, and you value it at $15/hr, then, no, you’re going to do it yourself.
    • randusername 5mo ago
      This helps but it brings its own dangers. At high income it can make you feel silly for doing anything other than working. You second-guess walking the dog even if you enjoy it because you can pay someone to do it for so much less.
      • fuzzfactor 5mo ago
        Yes. I've said it before but one of the greatest luxuries in life is the time to be able to do your own gardening and laundry. You could consider that the higher the hourly worth in your profession, the greater the luxury :)
• mieubrisse 5mo ago
  I see this with my dad as he approaches retirement. I try to remind him that if he doesn't pay with money, he's going to pay with his time... and right now he's saving money he doesn't need for time he doesn't have.
• sundarurfriend 5mo ago
  Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much is a pretty good book about the psychology of this. The stronger your the necessity for saving (whether from poverty or external influence like here), the deeper it gets embedded in your psyche as well, and can start to feel like "this is just who I am" as in habits around this becoming something you see as intrinsic to your personality.
• ChuckMcM 5mo ago
  May I suggest you read, "Scarcity: Why having too little means so much" (https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much-ebook/dp/B00BMKOO6S https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much-ebo...) it is a really interesting book which explores maladaptive frugality. We often talk about money and how people don't have enough, but these principles apply to any resource, in my own case I found cases where 'never having enough time' would push me to make bad choices about how I spent time. The author is talking about spending money but consider the adage "If its worth doing over then its worth doing right the first time."
• AIorNot 5mo ago
  I think Jimmy Yang summarizes this essay more effectively: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9wJ6B7z3Hyk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9wJ6B7z3Hyk