15 Frugal Life Skills To Master In 2023

If you're an old millennial like me, there's a good chance you grew up watching MacGyver. He not only knew how to build a hot air balloon from a soccer ball, but how to make an effective bazooka using only a muffler, a seat cushion, and a lighter. Well, we may not all have the crazy engineering skills that MacGyver had, but we might have something better. Frugal Life Skills So in salute to our favorite TV character, in today's video, let me share with you 12 of my personal favorite frugal life skills. And hi, if you're new to the channel, my name is Tay from Financial Tortoise, where we learn to grow our wealth slow and steady. Number one frugal life skill. Learn how to cut hair. Haircuts can be expensive. I know this very well because haircuts are one category in my life where I lavishly spend money on. But do you know whose haircut I don't spend money on? My kids. Ever since my son was born, I cut his hair pretty much every month. It's not a salon level haircut, but it does the job. And I admit, the first few ones didn't come out pretty. But with time and a lot of practice, it actually looks pretty decent now. Invest in a nice clipper and a quality scissor and check out the tutorials on YouTube. I'm confident after a few haircuts, you'll get the hang of it. And it could save you hundreds, if not thousands over time. Now, if you can learn to cut your own hair, you're truly at MacGyver level. Real quick, before we jump to the next lesson, if you haven't downloaded your free copy of my 10-step guide to securing your family's financial future, I highly recommend you do so today. Not only is this a great free resource for your financial journey, but you'll also be joining my email newsletter. Newsletter where you can connect with me directly, as you'll be the first to know regarding any new services or products I plan on offering in the future. Please go to my website at financialtortoise.com and download your free copy today. I'll also have a link in the description below. Number two frugal life skill. Learn how to make your own cup of coffee at home. Buying a cold brew at a coffee shop every morning may be convenient, but it also gets expensive. If you spend $5 every day on a cup of coffee, that's more than $1,800 a year. I also know this personally, because my wife and I did this for many years before we started making coffee at home. And we didn't do this just once a day, sometimes two or even three times a day. I know, we have a coffee problem. So we learned to make coffee at home. And because we don't want to skimp on quality, we actually invest in a full lot latte machine. We learned how to grind the beans, tamp the grounds, and pull the shots ourselves. Now my wife is definitely more of the expert in this category than I, but at least one of us has the skill down. Not only does this save money overall, but saves a trip to the coffee shop. Number three frugal life skill. Learn to cook up a signature dish at home. Nothing eats into our discretion spending more than food, and especially if you get in the habit of eating out regularly. A single meal out can set you back about $10. Multiply this three times a day, 30 days a month, and you're talking about close to $1,000 a month on food alone. The best way to mitigate your food costs is to cook at home. I know, cooking, especially for my generation, is a quickly disappearing skill set. Our parents were so much better at it. But that doesn't mean we can't make something at home. A good starting place is to focus on one or two signature dishes you can confidently rely on. For the Kim family, if we're feeling Italian, a spaghetti. If we're feeling Korean, a seaweed soup. Both don't require an advanced degree in culinary art. The family enjoys it, and it sure beats the cost of eating out. Number four frugal life skill. Learn how to meal prep. You got your signature dish down, but you want to take your saving money on food to the next level? Learn to meal prep. Batch making the majority of your meals ahead of time, so you don't have to spend your precious time thinking about what to eat, and your precious money all on food. For me personally, I make a week's worth of protein shake for breakfast, and a month's worth of chicken, brown rice, and broccoli, and freeze them for lunch. It doesn't win any tasting awards, but this skill has saved me thousands of dollars in food, and it also enabled me to maintain a relatively healthy diet throughout my 30s and 40s. Number five frugal life skill. Get good at finding free entertainment. What's the first thing we do when we're bored at home? We go online. We see what our friends are up to on Facebook. We check our emails to see if there are any promotions we missed, and we browse what new items are on sale at Amazon. And before we know it, we pulled out our credit card, and we're expectantly typing the credit card number into our computer. Instead of defaulting to mindless shopping, get intentional about finding free entertainment. One of my favorite free activities is to visit the local park. Not only do the kids enjoy it, but my mind isn't cluttered by everything online, and it doesn't cost a cent. All right, free entertainment is great and all, but what if I want to catch up on my latest TV show, or just want to relax at home watching my favorite movie? That's where the next frugal life skill comes in. Number six frugal life skill. Learn to survive on one streaming video subscription service. Paid video on demand service is one of the fastest growing sector in the entertainment industry. Initially, it was just Netflix, but now you have countless number of companies vying for your business. The choices are enough to make your head spin. It's tempting to have more than one service, given that most are less than $20. But think twice before piling on one more subscription service to your ever-growing list. $10 here and $20 there may not sound like much initially, but over time, they can add up to quite a bit of change. In addition, when you have multiple video subscription services, it's easy to get caught up in the analysis paralysis. What should I watch today? It's hard enough choosing a movie from one service. When you have multiple services, you spend more time trying to find what to watch rather than actually watching. Why overcomplicate your life? Learn to survive on one video subscription service. Not only will this simplify your life, your wallet will appreciate you for it. Number seven frugal life skill. Learn how to come up with fun home activities and games. This is especially crucial if you have young kids. The global toy market is valued at over $170 billion. There is a lot of toys and a lot of very expensive ones at that. As parents raising young children, it's easy to default to buying toys to keep our kids distracted. However, all our kids really want is engagement, not the most expensive toys. If you can come up with fun activities to do at home, not only are you building lasting memories, it's much better for your wallet. Here's some of my favorite things to do with my kids that are both cost effective and also engaging, which is another way of saying my kids are distracted for a longer period of time. Balloons. The amount of fun young kids can have with a 5-cent air-filled balloon still amazes me. Chalk drawing. Have your kids play with your chalk in the driveway. If you can buy them in bulk, they're quite affordable. Drawing contest. Only thing you need are a box of crayons and recycled paper from work. My kids get really into it and super upset if I select one over the other, so I have to be a careful judge. Resist the temptation to buy expensive toys whenever your kids are bored. Get creative. Not only will you feel better about yourself, your kids will appreciate you. Number eight frugal life skill. Learn how to ride public transportation. If you live in part of the states where driving is a norm, riding the bus or the subway can feel uncomfortable. But public transportation is actually the normal way of getting around in most parts of the world. And it's a lot more cost effective. Couple months ago when my wife and I were in Manhattan, New York, the subway fare was $2.75, regardless of the distance. We were able to travel from midtown to downtown for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. The same distance in an Uber, close to $40. Don't know how to ride the public transportation? No worries. There are so many great travel YouTubers that provide free resources on how you can do this in pretty much every major city you can think of. Number nine frugal life skill. Learn to quickly calculate per unit cost. Different retail stores package products differently. Toilet papers are sold in groups of four, six, or sometimes 12. You might automatically assume that more is cheaper, but sometimes it's not. To be sure, you need to do the math. Learn to look at products by per unit cost by dividing the total cost by the number of units you're buying. Some retailers actually do this for you automatically, enabling you to compare if one grouping of products is actually cheaper than the other. Number 10 frugal life skill. Learn basic sewing. Learn how to patch clothes. This is quite useful if you have young kids. So often my kids come home with small tears in their pants or holes in their socks. Their lives revolve around running around, so it's not a surprise. However, if we're to throw out every pair of pants that had a small tear or a pair of socks with a hole, the expenses can add up pretty quickly. And my kids could care less what their clothes look like as long as they have the permission to roll around as their heart wishes. If you don't know how to do this yourself, you can also find a local clothes alteration place that can revive your clothes for the fraction of cost compared to a new pair. But patching clothes is not hard. Just look up YouTube videos. There are tons of tutorials that can teach you the basics of sewing and mending. And when you mend, you not only save money, you'll save time you'll need to spend if shopping for new clothes. Number 11, frugal life skill. Learn to assemble an Ikea furniture. I've done my fair share of furniture shopping and no retail can really compare to Ikea when it comes to cost. Yes, the quality isn't pottery barn or crate and barrel, but it does the job. Given my kids put a lot of the furniture through quite a bit of wear and tear, I pretty much get everything I need for their rooms from Ikea. Bed, chairs, bookshelf, even their bedding. Maybe when they get older, I might invest in some nicer furniture, but at this stage, I can't justify the cost. But Ikea furniture isn't the easiest to set up and some frankly can be quite a headache. But it's a great skill to get affordable furniture quickly and cheaply into your house. Number 12, frugal life skill. Learn to travel hack. Credit cards can be dangerous in the wrong hands, but in the right hands, they can be dangerous for the credit card company. Travel hacking simply is using the benefits from travel credit cards to minimize travel costs. Credit card companies have to provide incentive for people to sign up and keep the credit card in their wallet. Incentives like free lounge access, points transfer capability, and free baggage check-in. But the fact is that majority people don't maximize these incentives. Travel hackers not only juice out all the benefits that these credit cards offer, they go out of their way to stack some of these benefits on top of each other. For example, by strategically leveraging credit card benefits, my family and I have not only been able to fly for free, but stay at hotels completely free, access lounges while we're at the airport, and even get TSA free and clear costs subsidized by the credit card company. I'll have some resources you can reference in the description below if this is a frugal skill you want to hone. Number 13, frugal life skill. Learn to survive on a simple wardrobe. I have a very simple wardrobe. I wear pretty much the same shirt every day, same jeans, and during the summer, the same khaki shorts. Not only am I saving mental bandwidth on trying to pick what clothes to wear every day, I'm also able to save money and save time. If you're into fashion, it might require a bit of trial and error, but another way to simplify your wardrobe without wearing the same thing every day is by deciding on one or two clothing brand. Most often a clothing brand has its own unique style and look. If that aligns with you, you can find savings by being a loyal customer. My wife does this with her wardrobe. She definitely has better fashion taste than I, and the way she mitigates her decision making as well as cost is by shopping only at her favorite boutique clothing brand. They offer promotions to their loyal customers, and she spends less time trying to mix and match different outfits from different clothing brands. In the theme of wardrobe, number 14 frugal life skill you want to master is to invest in thermal wear. This is especially helpful if you live in a colder region of the world or the winter time for everyone else. When the weather turns cold, our automatic response is to turn the heat on. This way we can walk around comfortably in our t-shirts and shorts at home. However, what if we flipped this around? Instead of making the home feel like a sauna, what if we wore warmer clothes? Specifically, thermal wears underneath our regular clothes. Thermals are designed to safeguard against different kinds of heat loss. They protect against convection, evaporation, and conduction as well. So when you wear them at home, it reduces the requirement for your personal temperature management. Your thermostat can work less, you feel warm regardless, and at the end of the day, you have a lower energy bill. Number 15 frugal life skill, and this is probably the most controversial one, and that is to normalize no presents during special days. Holidays, anniversaries, and even birthdays. Yes, that is right. I am that cruel husband and father that denies my wife an anniversary present and my kid's birthday present. Actually, I'm not that extreme. Instead of a present, my wife and I agreed upon cash gifts. Something that she can spend on whatever she desires. This way she doesn't have to endure through all my bad second guessing of what she wants. For my kid, instead of a physical present, we discuss an activity we can do together. A dinner out with the family, or a visit to their favorite event, soccer game, or a trip to SeaWorld. For me, the saving from no presents really comes down to time and minimizing physical items we are in love with. And if we really want something, why wait until a special day to get it? In addition, I want to normalize the experiences of our things as something to look forward to when it comes to special days. Thank you guys for watching, and the theme of my lack of romanticism, if you'd like to learn more about things I don't spend money on, please check out my video here. Until next time, all the best.