Free money is easy to come by if you’re creative. What are the limits of your creativity?
I motivate myself to get just one more use out of my things by telling myself that I am lowering my cost per use. Example…if I take five minutes to remove a stain from a shirt, I might get 10 more uses out of it. Considering that I have gotten 10 uses out of it and plan on getting 10 more, if I bought it from a thrift shop for $5, then my cost per use is 25 cents.
If, on the other hand, I get a stain on a shirt, bought it from Macy’s for $25, and decide not to fix the stain myself, and I have already gotten ten uses out of it, my cost per use was $2.50 - ten times the cost! If your house cost ten times as much, would you probably reconsider? Then why won’t you do it with a shirt?
It gets better, though. If you are a bit creative, and watch Freecycle for a deal, you might get the shirt for free. Cost per use = $0.
The second part of the equation for me is putting off buying something new. If I save the shirt and use it until I cannot use it anymore, I won’t have to buy another shirt for awhile, saving the amount of shirts I have to buy over a lifetime.
Let’s say over the course of a regular lifetime, I have to buy 200 shirts. If I make things last longer, I can probably get by with half the shirts, saving half my shirt cost over the course of a lifetime, plus whatever kinds of sales or free shirts I can get!
I try to treat my life costs like a business. How do you use these principles?
This all seems like free money to me, because you would have to spend the time to go to the mall anyway, try on the shirt, find the shirt, etc. It is worth any extra five minutes I may have to spend to go through the thrift store racks or treat my clothes nicely (by line drying them) to get the extra usage.
