For people like me, frugality is a lifestyle and dictates any and every choice I make. In fact much of the enjoyment I get from buying something isn’t just the value of what I got, it’s also how little I spent to acquire it. Accomplishing budget targets is fun, and leads to a lifestyle where I crave this fun over owning more stuff.
This leads to what I call The Starbucks Paradox. The Starbucks Paradox is about how someone who buys something with money they earned and weren’t simply given would never buy Starbucks because they simply could not appreciate the item compared with the amount of money it cost them. The Starbucks Paradox can be phrased as:
If I made enough money to buy from Starbucks I wouldn’t be buying from Starbucks.
This was discovered when after I saved enough at the end of the month to buy a $5 crushed ice coffee syrup drink I realized I genuinely didn’t want it. Regardless of the fact I could buy so much more with $5, just the mere fact that I’d have to part ways with $5 to enjoy something that’d last 5 minutes, that ruined the entire willpower to buy it.
July 18, 2018 at 12:12PM
