I do a lot of reading on budgeting, couponing, and ways to cut costs. It’s become very apparent to me that most people who end up in my search results do not bring new recommendations to the table and are, instead, taking each other’s existing listicles or Reddit comments and repackaging them, or speculating based on their imagination, without much regard for people looking for this advice.
And I’m over it. Here’s my pet peeves:
Budgeting advice for people who already actually have money
I make about $1,700 a month. About 20% of this is skimmed off for taxes, because I don’t claim any exemptions on my I9. I try to automatically divert another 20% (post-tax) into my savings. And to be clear, I’m not currently saving up for anything fun or exciting. I’m just trying to have any savings at all. It doesn’t last because it basically all gets pulled back out for a surprise expense. I am several thousands of dollars in debt and cannot currently opt out of incurring more debt because I have a terminally ill dog whose meds, which are currently helping him immensely, cost like $200 a month, and the main thing I am saving for at the time of writing is his end-of-life and post-mortem expenses.
I live with family, but cannot justify dipping into their funds beyond a periodic purchase. I am on the edge of making too much for Medicaid in my state if I pick up even just a few extra hours a month right now, and I cannot justify coming off Medicaid because I don’t have enough left over to pay the premium on a marketplace plan. And mind you, I live in Pennsylvania, where there is no Medicaid gap. It also means that I have to be extremely careful about receiving financial help, because again, I cannot afford to not be on Medicaid.
Because I am on Medicaid (apparently the letter announcing I was getting kicked off was an error which nobody has an explanation for beyond, “sometimes correspondence is just wrong”), I currently have to pay out of pocket for therapy. Technically, therapy is an optional expense, but I’ve lived with being mentally ill long enough to know that I will not survive without therapy. This is $180 a month for my one and only session. If I was on a marketplace plan and could hand this off to insurance, $180 would probably cover two sessions, at worst. The difference between monthly and fortnightly therapy sessions in terms of my quality of life is astronomical.
And yes, that means, it costs me more to be on Medicaid. I still can’t afford to not be on Medicaid. Especially because I needed to go through PT for pelvic pain that has plagued me for months on end, and they already pre-approved the PT. I cannot justify upsetting any of that, because when your pelvic floor is locked up, it’s hard to do much of anything.
Further, when I look at how people get by with similar incomes to mine, it turns out they’re already homeowners, and own cars, or live in places where a car isn’t necessary and it actually makes sense to go by foot or use transit. But I do not own a home. I do not own a car. I live in the country. And even then, I have the advantage of having conditional access to the cars of the people I live with.
Sometimes people just don’t have the cash flow. Even with help, even with what looks like other options, an individual person can still end up just being poor.
Lists of things to start or stop doing (that people already do, or don’t do)
Or, you know, can’t do, or can’t stop doing. I don’t have cable. I don’t have streaming services, and if I have to stream something I either use my parents’ accounts (which they encourage) or use free sites with a dubious legal status. (That said, all those sites swear up and down that they’re legal.) I use a phone plan that I pre-pay in July for the full year that, I think, I got a pretty sweet deal on. Even then, I had to wait for a paycheck to hit to make use of an additional discount that they were offering. I live with other people and am not at liberty to mess around with the water heater to save a few bucks a month. I am meticulous about electricity usage. I already make my own laundry powder. I buy most groceries according to best possible unit price, I use a price book, and I stack store sales, coupons and rebates to the extent that these options allow. (This is not counting the fact that I prioritize Zapatista coffee, and pastured eggs from a farm around the corner, because I think these are very worthwhile exceptions and I still take the frugal option available by buying bulk.) I then collect more rebates through receipt-snapping apps. I rescue discarded food from my workplace. (I donate the good stuff, save the borderline stuff for myself, and give the edible but unappetizingly ugly stuff to the ducks.) I forage fruit and herbs. I cook from scratch when I have time. I turn bones into stock, which I freeze and can, and I turn meat scraps into scrapple. I walk when it’s practical to do so—in a rural area.
I am always trying to find a way to extend my ability to stretch a dollar, and no matter how I go looking for this information, everything recommended is either entirely irrelevant, or telling me to drop things I’ve never done or haven’t done in years, and start doing things I’ve already been doing for years. I have no interest in the 101-level money saving tips. I’m trying to branch out. And if I google extreme money saving tips, I insist that they actually be extreme.
Quit telling me to cut cable!
Advice that hasn’t been relevant in years
I’ve largely dropped “thrift store” as a phrase from my vocabulary. They’re secondhand stores, but they’re not really that thrifty anymore. Not since thrifting has come to be treated as a personality trait or the beginnings of a business venture, and these increases in demand, plus background inflation, have driven the prices up.
On top of this, brick and mortar secondhand shops haven’t been a place where I bother doing most shopping for a long time, especially because the only item I consistently need to replace is pants. I’m short and fat, and the chances that I’ll find a 40w/28L pair of jeans new in a brick and mortar shop is so slim as to be functionally impossible. I do not have the skills to hem jeans. I cannot emotionally handle trying on a bunch of pants that are absurdly long on me and I won’t. And even 28L is too long, my inseam is actually 26 inches. But good luck finding men’s jeans in that size.
I have had my victories in secondhand stores—my $9 Anywear clogs, my armchair, an absolutely bitchin‘ Scherenschnitte of two roosters, an enamel bowl with a wide flat bottom perfect for making salads—but finding clothing in them has become something with basically no return on investment. If I only buy what I need, and if what I need is clothing, then there’s nothing for me there.
When I buy clothes secondhand, I get them on eBay, which is where I’ve snagged my overalls that I basically live in. Mercari is too expensive (because it’s expensive to sell on Mercari, too) and Poshmark puts too much emphasis on brand.
Generalizing advice that’s only regionally relevant
I only lived in a city for about four months and it was extraordinarily expensive for me, because I couldn’t adapt my established tactics for saving money to the environment I was in. If you don’t have adequate storage space, you can’t buy bulk. If you don’t have a car, any bulk buying has to happen online or through a delivery service, which kind of negates the savings. Foraging potential is dubious (though I do know people who forage fruits and nuts in the city), though dumpster diving might be easier. You can’t grow veggies without either floor space or outdoor space and you definitely cannot legally raise your own livestock in the city—even if there’s room, you’d have to plan around zoning or your neighbors ruining it for you. I, for one, do not like the idea of leaning on my neighbor’s good graces not to snitch. Especially because the neighbor I shared my bedroom wall with in Philly was regularly blasting bassy music at 3 in the morning. Hated that guy.
Affiliate links to things that are only cheap for the first month or year
We are all going to do things we’re not proud of to make money. I applied to a contractor job as an AI trainer and I was emphatically not thrilled with myself in the slightest, but I did it because I was nannying on top of my day job and needed more money and needed something I could do while the baby was sleeping.
(Thankfully there were technical issues that prevented me from signing into the project at all, so my conscience was saved.)
Most affiliate marketing is really whatever to me at worst, but I think it’s disingenuous when you’re running a blog on saving money and you offer coupon codes for things that very quickly stop being the frugal option. Being frugal is about saving your own money, not trying to wheedle it out of other people. Some forms of affiliate marketing could really stand to elicit a bit of shame.
Related, I’ve developed quite a distaste for How To Run A Blog-type blogs. Over it.
Of Cabbages and Strings 