Being Too Frugal Makes it Hard to Enjoy Savings

I saw an interesting article about saving money the other day. "A couple who retired early with $4.3 million says the FIRE lifestyle is wearing thin: ‘We don't want to just keep throwing money on the pile and keep being cheap.’" The story has been picked up by a number of news outlets. Here's a Yahoo! article link (25 Jun 2023) because it's the least likely to disappear behind a paywall. The story tells of a couple, Mindy and Carl, who are multi-millionaires but spend too much time and emotional energy agonizing over small purchases. Their habit of extreme frugality has made it hard for them to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Let me offer a definition here for those who are wondering. "FIRE" is Financial Independence/Retire Early. The term was coined in 1992, in the book Your Money or Your Life. The FIRE movement, as it's often called, has gotten closer to the mainstream in recent years as bloggers and influencers have popularized it with younger generations of adults getting an early start on planning ahead for retirement.

The idea of FIRE is simple: you save aggressively, and invest your money wisely, building a portfolio of assets big enough to make you financially independent (FI-), enabling you to quit your job and retire early (-RE). How big is "big enough"? Big enough that the cash flow you earn from your investments basically replaces your need for salaries. And how aggressive is "save aggressively"? Ah, there's the rub.

Typical FIRE success stories tell of couples who worked well-paying professional jobs for as little as 10 years, saved every penny they could, and retired by age 40. Common in these stories is financial self-denial. People take their upper-middle class incomes from jobs as software developers, finance pros, and lawyers and budget themselves like starving grad students. They live in small, plain apartments or houses, even leeching off generous parents if they can to avoid paying for housing, stint on travel and material goods, and eat meals of cheap foodstuffs like rice and beans.

Let me emphasize, people who live in shared housing, or buy cheap groceries and rarely eat out, or own a bicycle instead of a car because they can't afford more are different from FIRE followers. FIRE people typically earn 6 figures, often well into the 6 figures, and save half or more of their pay.

One of my computer-engineer colleagues in the late 1990s was a FIRE adherent. Instead of renting an apartment in pricey Silicon Valley he kept a bedroll under his desk at the office and slept there. He showered at the company gym in an adjoining building and kept a few of his possessions locked in the trunk of his well-used economy car down in the parking garage. "I'm saving an extra $15k a year not paying rent and utilities!" he boasted. Today the figure would be at least double.

Sleeping under your desk and showering at the office to avoid renting an apartment may seem like taking frugality to an extreme, but that's the sort of tradeoff FIRE adherents seriously consider. I've always been a frugal person myself, or at least have always had frugal tendencies— see my example from a few years ago about how long I wore a pair of sandals before spending to replacing them— but to me that's beyond the pale. I decided back in school that as I embarked on a well-paying career I would strike a balance between saving money for the future and enjoying the fruits of my labor in the present.

Mattress Shopping

Hawk and I have bought a new bed mattress. Our old one, really not even that old at just over 8 years now, developed a sag in one side and needed to be replaced.

First store: Good mattress, but it's $3,000

We began our mattress shopping on a whim. The weekend before last we were out getting lunch on Sunday (this is after coming home Saturday night from our aborted Bassi Falls trip) and said, "Hey, there's a mattress store across the street, let's stop there and look around." We stopped in, and with the help of a reasonably knowledge store manager immediately picked a short-list of mattresses to try. All were at least close to what we wanted. One, a particular Stearns & Foster model, was on the money. Speaking of money, there was good news and bad news. Good news: it wasn't the most expensive mattress in the store. Bad news: it was still $3,000 for queen size.

Checking online: Seemingly credible options from $600

During the week I spent a bit of time shopping online. On Amazon I found seemingly credible options from $600. That's obviously way cheaper than $3000. The thing is we can afford $3k if that's what it takes for the right mattress, but the $2,400 difference is real money to us. We're not that well off! Moreover, when there's a 5-to-1 price range even after crossing off the cheapest and priciest products it demands careful shopping to understand what differences lie beneath such disparate prices.

I scoured through product listings on Amazon and cross-referenced them with manufacturers' sites and third-party reviews sites. The first difference I found was, basically, foam mattresses vs. coil or coil-and-foam hybrid mattresses. We knew from trying a foam mattress at the first store that we both hate their feel. Alas, they are less expensive. But knowing they're also the wrong thing for us made it easier to cross off the cheapest products.

The next thing I checked was the price of name-brand mattresses online. Are brick-and-mortar stores like the one we visited gouging with huge markups? Actually they're not. The big name manufacturers regulate the pricing so you see the same price online as in stores.

That still left a bunch of lesser-known brands of coil based mattresses priced well below $3,000, like half or less. The challenge there is that we're both sensitive enough to what we need in a mattress that we're unwilling to buy without testing it first. So back to other brick-and-mortar shops we went.

Second store: Similar mattresses, snotty salesguy

This past Saturday we tried another local store after lunch. There are basically 2 chains that run basically all the standalone mattress stores nowadays. We went to the one that's not the one we checked the previous weekend. For being a different brand store, the selection was pretty similar. That kind of makes sense as most of their selection is the same handful of big-name brands. Pricing was the same.

We were more serious about buying a mattress on Saturday than the weekend before— we decided we would "Buy It Now" for the right product at a fair price— so we asked more questions of the salesguy who helped us. At first he was helpful, then he seemed to be avoiding us, then he started negging us. Negging, as in giving snide or critical answers to reasonable questions we asked, clearly implying with his words and intonation that we were foolish for asking.

Fuck. That. Shit.

We left.

Third Store's a Charm!

Having effectively visited dozens of area mattress stores by sampling one each of the two chains I next looked for independent stores. I found one 5 miles away, so we went there next. It had lesser-known brand name mattresses at lower prices. But they were on display so we could test them. We found one that provided all the firm support we need in a mattress, at a price less than half the $3k mattress we liked at the first store. And, the store owner who helped us was knowledgeable and patient with answering all of our questions. We not only bought a mattress from him but started eyeing a replacement bed frame and a new dining room set, too!