luxuries

On days when I'm not working on bigger pieces of my project, I'm still trying to be aware of how I look at money, spending, and pleasures. One of my favorite things is good coffee and in trying to curb my daily visits to the coffee store for a pre-made drink, I've started to find an alternative in home-brewing. Since I developed such a snobby taste for my coffee, I can barely tolerate cheap, stale, bad tasting brew. I made an effort by buying the cheapest coffee Trader Joe offers, $4.99 a can for whole beans. While they smelled good, the resulting cup was absolutely disgusting and undrinkable to me. What does this mean in terms of my wider goal of minimizing my expenditures? One of the main tenets of "frugal living" is to buy quality, assuming that this will avoid the quantity purchases I make to over-compensate. Another tenet is to "make do". I struggled with this! Should I try to "make do" with coffee that doesn't taste good to me? I felt there had to be a compromise where I can choose some things that I will splurge on while cutting back in other areas.

I have settled on the cheapest beans from Peet's coffee, which run $12.50 for a pound. A pound of beans will last me well over 2 weeks, but this is still only saving me 50% off of buying the coffee pre-made from the shop. PLUS, the shop provides the sugar and milk. Ideally, I will find beans I can tolerate that cost less than $10 a pound.

All of this is to illustrate that quite a bit of the frugal living movement is pretty boring and incredibly self-involved. I know I struggled with taking this on as my senior project because it was so unbelievably navel gazing, but there is a broader scope. Consuming less is environmentally sound. Managing money wisely is a good example to set. Being aware and conscious when making purchases adds to the value of my choices. Hopefully this will make it all seem worthwhile.