I am tracking my everyday expenditure since 2003; I know this is not news for few of you. In all these years, I used to share my little know-how of budgeting and tracking with my friends, but never until last year anyone esteemed or discussed this with me. All I used to hear from them were downbeat things about tracking and budgeting. "Is it worth to waste that much time on these things?" was one of the most common comments. I hardly got any affirmation on my frugal ideas.
Not anymore. In last 3 months, 4 of my colleagues and friends have sought my support because all of the sudden they have realized that they have so little nest egg, so less assets, and how their expenses are sky rocketing in this uncertain economy. I have helped them by encouraging them to read more about personal finance, by sending them my favorite links about this topic, by helping them come up with their tracking spreadsheets. All of them came back to me after one month sharing that they never knew they spent so much monthly, an eye opener for them.
Now they don't pass any opportunity to share their new frugal idea with whole group and most of the times when they ask me how I found it, I reply that its brilliant idea and it works because I am actually following it from last XXX years.
No, I am not claiming that I am a personal finance expert or anything like that. I still consider myself novice in the field and try to learn about new things. All I want to say that frugality, cutting down cost, saving money; this all has been new craze around me. I never saw people being so enthusiastic about penny-pinching. In fact few of my colleagues have transformed from "I don't like discussing money, it's just so cheap" to "you know I changed my phone from post-paid to pre-paid and it saved me XXX Rs."
My concern here is how long this new craze will last. Will this new bragging ever stop? Or should I get accustomed to this?
How about you? Have you seen similar change around you or are you one of them who changed their habits to frugal recently?
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It's my hope that this nouveau frugality becomes a life-long habit. As we go through it, we teach it to our kids. You're being a good example to your friends, and that's awesome!
ReplyDeleteI wanted to tell you, we made chicken masala for dinner last night and I thought of you. :)