Please welcome back our usual Wednesday contributor, Grayson from Debt Roundup…
My friends and family call me a very frugal man. I didn’t used to be this way, but after battling my way through massive credit card debt, frugality seemed to fit. I don’t mind being frugal, but don’t call me cheap! There is a difference. I guess you can say that frugal is the new cheap.
I manage my money, track my spending, and try to do what I can to pay less for items I normally buy. I am also a DIY nut who loves to try his hand at almost anything. I will try something once to see if I can do it. After that, I will call the professionals. That being said, there were countless times this weekend when I wanted to throw frugality out the window.
When Frugality and Moving Don’t Mix
My wife and I just closed on a new home. We have been searching for it for some time. We were happy to find one and we moved in this past weekend. In order to save money during the process, we were going to move ourselves. I rented a moving truck and started packing it up. Unfortunately, the biggest truck I could get didn’t hold all of our stuff. This meant multiple trips.
After two days of moving boxes and other big items into our new home, I was spent. I had no energy left, but there was a long checklist of things needing to be completed. Before we started packing, my wife asked if we could just hire a moving company. I didn’t want to because of the expense. Well, after spending two days moving our crap, I wished I had hired the moving company. While being frugal is cool, so is being able to stand without your back tensing up. I am not as young as I used to be!
Frugal Painting
One of the main projects in our new home was to paint. We needed to paint pretty much the entire inside of the home. While that is not that bad, it ended up being a very large project. We had bought all of our paint during a huge Memorial Day sale. We saved a lot of money on the paint.
In order to save more money, we wanted to do the painting ourselves. I am pretty good at painting as I have done it multiple times. After we started some work, we realized it was going to take a lot more time than we had originally allocated. We are three days into painting and pretty close to picking up the phone to call a company to finish it. I will gladly pay someone at this point.
Frugal Flooring
I am pretty good at doing flooring. The one exception is carpet. I just don’t have the tools and don’t want to rent them. We paid a company to install new carpet for us, but in order to save money, we had to pull up the old carpet and then remove the staples from the pad. This didn’t sound so bad. Well, tell that to my back! After a day of pulling up carpets and bending over to remove staples one by one, I wish I had just paid the company to remove the stuff. They only charged $150 to remove, but I wanted to keep that money to pay for other things. My frugal side won the decision, but my logical side just kicked me in the butt.
The point of this is to show that you don’t always have to be frugal. On the quest to constantly save money, I have clouded my judgement. These three scenarios show me that paying someone to do a task for you can pay off. While I value my money, I also value my time (and my back!). I have been spending the past four days killing myself to try to get the home in a move-in ready state. Our stuff is in our basement and we are living out of bags. I will be doing work every night after work until the home is ready. I am sure I will be very tempted to open up all of the windows and toss frugality right out of them.
Have you ever just wanted to forget frugality and go with convenience and time saving methods? If you’ve moved, what did you do to keep expenses down? Looking back, what did you do yourself that you wish you would have just paid someone to do for you?
Photo courtesy of: Steven DepeloSimilar Posts:
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