Lesser-Known Frugal Tips That Have The Biggest Impact, As Shared In This Online Thread

In recent days, a thread popped up on r/Frugal, a subreddit dedicated to exercising the right kind of mental approach to how we consider our resources and their allocation. The subreddit has been around since 2008 (quite appropriately, during a severe financial crisis), is home to 3.6M members, and is ranked among the top 1% of subreddits on the platform.

In the thread, Redditor u/Cucumberappleblizz asked folks to share their truly unique frugal tips—advice that they don’t think many people know about.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to generate 1,400 comments and another 1,400 upvotes, providing ample reason to be smarter with your resources by suggesting even ampler methods as to how to pull it off.

Without going too deep into the tips themselves, they all essentially revolved around a key element found in the subreddit’s description: “Frugality is the mental approach we each take when considering our resource allocations. It includes time, money, convenience, and many other factors.”

That last bit—time, money, convenience, and other factors. Reconsider them by optimizing.

Consider this: instead of going to the grocery store without any idea on what you need, plan it. You know, make a list, coordinate your groceries so you don’t overbuy or end up with leftover ingredients.

This also gives you an opportunity to do your research on whether there are any discounts, what stores have them, and plan several meals in advance instead of having to drive to the store seven times in a week. Yes, it demands time, but you spend less money.

It goes without saying that planning ahead and doing one trip instead of several also has a positive impact on the environment and your total car mileage in the end will be less because of it.

We can go on and on about it, but let’s do the frugal thing and reuse what we already have by suggesting our own reading on the small ways in which you can help the environment.

Anywho, from a material perspective, frugality is definitely about managing your resources more efficiently. But there’s more to it than that.

Frugality indirectly promotes creativity. By establishing a constraint on what folks spend money on, the constraint encourages them to start thinking outside the box. So, if you can’t buy branded clothes, you might start reusing what you already have to mix new styles. Or you say “hello” to clothing swaps and thrift stores, which brings us to our next point—social sustainability.