What are your plans for the “don’t need to be frugal” stage?

We discussed this topic briefly in the last Tightwad Gazette post because Amy wrote an essay about the possibilities that open up when you don’t need to be frugal anymore.

(Because, presumably, your years of penny-pinching have put you in a stable financial place.)

I thought it would be fun to chat about what we all would do if we were financially secure enough to jettison frugality.

What practices would you keep up? What would you drop? How would you spend your time and money?

I’ll answer first (perk of being the blogger: you always go first. Ha.) and then you guys can answer the questions as well!

Things I would still do

Some of the frugal things I do have other benefits, so here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I’d do even if I was oozing with money.

Cook at home and pack my lunches

This is cheaper for sure, but also: I can generally feed myself more nutritious food if I eat home-cooked, home-prepped food.

Plus, cooking at home produces a lot less trash than getting takeout does. The same goes for packing a lunch; I pack food in my stainless steel containers, which are gonna last basically forever.

(I do use Pyrex when I need to heat something up!

Work to avoid food waste

In-home food waste is a big environmental problem because the wasted food ends up rotting in landfills, producing methane gas. And it’s not just restaurants and stores that are throwing food away; households are the sources of almost half of the food in landfills.

So, I’d still work hard to limit my food waste.

Obtain second-hand things

I’m pretty sure I will always be a member of my Buy Nothing group, and I’ll still be an eBay buyer.

Second-hand items are cheaper, yes, but they are also generally eco-friendly.

Buy high-quality stuff

Not only do high-quality items save money in the long run, they also are good for the environment. So Rich Kristen would still look for heirloom quality stuff.

 

Also, it’s just nice to not have to repeatedly replace things!

Avoid disposable items when possible

I’d mainly keep up with this for environmental reasons. But also, there are many cases where a non-disposable item is just more luxurious than the disposable counterpart.

Repair things

Not to be a broken record but…it’s usually better for the earth if we repair items instead of throwing them away and then purchasing a replacement.

 

And if you’ve obtained a high-quality item (as mentioned above), an upside is that it is often repairable. On the flip side, poorly made items sometimes cannot be repaired.

For instance, I’m thinking of the difference between, say, a particle board bookshelf and a wooden bookshelf. The particle board shelf is hard to rehab, but a wooden one can almost always be made like new again.

Things I would change/spend more on

Home/appliance repair

If I had piles of money, I would never repair an appliance myself.

I also would probably not bother with almost any home repairs or upgrades (aside from painting). It would make me very happy to throw some money at the problem instead.

I can do a lot of these types of tasks, but I do not enjoy the process at all! Ergo, Rich Kristen would hire it out.

Lawn care

I would 100% hire someone to mow my yard and do landscaping.

Travel

If I had tons of money, I would always choose the non-stop flights that leave at convenient times of day. 😉

And I probably would spend less time hunting for the best lodging deals. I would stay at ALL of the fun and unique AirBnbs without thinking about the price.

Giving/Volunteering

If I did not need to work for pay as a nurse, I would spend those hours doing things like humanitarian medical trips.

Also, because I remember how hard it was to find somewhere to rent as a newly separated person without a W-2 job, I would one day love to have a rental space (maybe a duplex or a mother-in-law suite type of thing) to offer as a really cheap rental to a mom who needs to leave a marriage.

I also would like to help someone like that with legal fees; so often women who have been stay-at-home moms have difficulty coming up with the funds to pay a divorce lawyer.

Car Cleaning

This is rather frivolous but you know what would be fun? To pop by one of those places that vacuums and details your car inside and out. If I were rich, I probably would do that semi-regularly.

A house!

I would buy a smallish house in a lovely location, with lots of big windows, a wrap-around porch, and a bathroom attached to my bedroom.

 

 

And I would hire someone to fix anything in the house that wasn’t to my liking (such as…NOT ENOUGH WINDOWS.) 😉

__________________

Since I have taken some steps back financially in mid-life, I don’t know if I will ever get to the point of being financially independent. But it is fun to imagine what I would do!

I am gonna be an empty nester in the near future, though, and then I’ll be just paying for my own expenses.

I will be making decent money as a nurse once I graduate next year.

Plus, I plan to continue blogging (if I can manage a blog on top of nursing school, I think I can manage it on top of nursing!), and all of this means there are a lot of reasons to think that I can make decent financial progress in the upcoming years.

Sooo, who knows? Perhaps some of the things on this list are pretty possible!

Your turn! If you were financially independent, what would change and what would stay the same?