Freedom 45: Loving the Frugal Life

I’m a paradox to my friends. I can be so cheap that I’ll go to the store twice to save $10 on cases of mushroom soup when it is on sale. Other times, I’ll spend $100 to see a play or $240 to see Cirque du Soleil with my wife on a whim. I’m making sure my money is making me happy.

If you save money on things you don’t care about it leaves you more money to spend on what you do love. At the same time, I don’t expect to do things like Cirque Du Soleil all the time. Here’s how we keep ourselves entertained on a tight budget.

1. Load up at the library

Libraries are the most under utilized way of saving tons of money. In addition to books, libraries typically have huge DVD collections which would put Blockbuster to shame, music CDs, all your favorite magazines and even allow you to borrow ebooks or surf the web on one of their computers.

For my family it’s a great source of entertainment since we love books and movies. We visit the library weekly. My two- and five-year-old boys usually find a couple of DVDs with an unexpected benefit of the seven-day rental. By the time Mom and Dad are sick of the DVD it has to go back. Try doing that the next time you buy Dora the Explorer or Thomas the Tank Engine.

The only drawback of the library is that you can’t always get what you want right away. You have to get used to placing holds and waiting for materials to arrive. So the latest movie that just came out will often take a month or more to show up at your house. Yet when I have 20 or more holds in the system at once, going to the library becomes a weekly surprise since I never know what’s going to show up next.

2. Four-course meal at my house

We get together with friends and skip the restaurant to do something a little more fun at our house. The rules are: every adult brings a bottle of wine (which you have to drink that evening) and everyone has to cook a course with a recipe they have never made before (even the poor husband that has only learned to cook recently).

We tend to stretch our cooking skills and try making meals from scratch, like dolmades, roasted eggplant and garlic soup, warm chili cashew chicken salad, ginger beef and my personal favourite: chocolate pate with crèam anglaise. The result is a very long evening with lots of laughter as we figure out how to get it all done. So far, we’ve never had a complete recipe failure, but we have needed to adjust the spice in a dish or two. It costs each couple $20 to $30 compared with more than $100 at a restaurant and it’s a lot more fun.

3. Camping and wine shopping

Cypress Hills Provincial Park is a particularly breathtaking camping spot in southwest Saskatchewan complete with rolling hills, forest hiking trials and a pristine lake right in the middle of otherwise flat prairie. It also happens to be right beside Saskatchewan’s only winery, Cypress Hills Vineyard & Winery.

We do an annual weekend camping trip to this lovely spot to hike, star gaze and swim in the lake. It costs about $115 including gas and groceries to camp, so we throw another $225 into the pot for a 12-bottle case of wine from the winery including Saskatoon berry, sour cherry, and rhubarb blend (which is a white, amazingly enough, and very good). We keep coming back as you can only buy the wines at the vineyard. Yet the trip is worth it to be able to sample those wines each month for the next year.

My point is: you can have fun without spending a lot of money. Our weekend trip is just one way, while the library and dinners at home are a few more. By making sure you’re frugal most of the time, it’s easy to have the money to do those more expensive experiences as they come up. That way, you don’t really feel deprived by spending less on the day-to-day things.

Engineer Tim Stobbs lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. You can follow his attempt to retire early on his blog Canadian Dream: Free at 45.E