About consistent with week inside the beyond, the Live Like a Mensch weblog ran a put up arguing that the name of the game to living below your way is to decrease your necessities. The fundamental argument become that it is a good deal less hard to satisfy all your desires if you clearly redefine sure necessities as luxuries. One instance she gave from her very personal lifestyles changed into the 20-yr-antique Volvo that her husband drives irrespective of the cruel teasing of friends and coworkers. For them, having a secure and reliable automobile is a want; having a vehicle that looks pinnacle, or one that modified into built in this century, might be a luxurious. She then invited her readers to call a few things that that they had decided to be goals in location of desires, no matter what others may think.
Interestingly, a similar question had been posed that identical week in my Tip Hero e-newsletter:
All this got me thinking, as I often have before, about where the line between luxuries and necessities lies in my own life. I suspect that many of the things I consider luxuries would be necessities for many of my peers, yet some of the things that are necessities for me might be luxuries for others. For example:
- High-speed Internet is a necessity; I've tried working from home without it, and it literally wasn't feasible. Cable TV, by contrast, is a luxury—especially since we already have high-speed Internet, which gives us access to nearly as rich a field of entertainment choices.
- A landline phone is a necessity; a cell phone is a luxury. This, again, is because of my job. It's essential to me to have a reliable connection in my home, which is also my workplace, but it's not important—or even desirable—to be reachable everywhere I go. For someone with a different job, one that required them to be on the road a lot, the cell phone might be a necessity and the landline a luxury.
- Central heating in my home is a necessity; air conditioning is a luxury. (An air conditioner in my car, by contrast, I consider a necessity—not so much for cooling as for defogging the windows. Around here, heat is unpleasant but not usually dangerous, while windows you can't see through can be deadly.)
- Hot and cold running water is a necessity. Separate sinks in the bathroom are a luxury.
- A dishwasher is a luxury. A microwave oven is a necessity.
- Having all the meats we purchase be free-range/humanely raised is a necessity, though it isn't a necessity to eat very much of them. Convenience foods of all kinds are luxuries. (Well, maybe not breakfast cereal.)
None of this is meant as an argument that the only things worth spending money on are necessities. On the contrary, for me the main point of frugality is that it frees up money to spend on things that are important to you, and that category is bound to include some luxuries along with the necessities. As Rose Schneiderman observed back in 1911, "The worker must have bread, but she must also have roses." We all need to feed our souls, as well as our bodies. The meaning of frugality is not, and never should be, to do without roses; it's to provide both bread and roses in as inexpensive and sustainable a way as possible. Homemade Golden Egg Bread, for instance, at about 85 cents a loaf, and roses cut from our very own backyard rosebush for free.
