Frugality and Luck

“You’re so lucky!” I hear that a lot, often in discussions where things are not going well with them, the car payment is sucking all available cash; she can’t quit her job to stay home with the kids because they truly need the income. Yes, I am lucky, but in many ways, I believe that we make our own luck. We are just now starting to really enjoy the fruits of choices we made when we married nearly five years ago. We live such a rich, abundant, worry free life right now, and a lot of that is a direct result of how we lived then.

We made choices then to ensure that we would be “lucky” someday. We made sacrifices that, frankly, kind of sucked at the time. Would we rather have heated the teeny tiny apartment more than 58 degrees (required by the lease so the pipes would not freeze) and not had to get creative with the .99 cent 20 pound bag of potatoes I picked up at Safeway’s grand opening? Sure. Potatoes get old, and even with coats and our electric blanket and hot teas and hot potato soup, we were cold. Wouldn’t we have loved to go to Six Flags with our friends, out to cool restaurants with our friends, or had a car that did not make questionable noises and emit strange smells? Duh! Who wouldn’t? We did not deny ourselves these things for fun. We did them because we had goals and we wanted to achieve them on our own, without help from our parents and without consumer debt.

Our “luck” stems from what we did not do- the concerts we did not see, the trips we did not take while we were working to achieve our goals. There will be more concerts, other trips. While we obviously do not plan on waiting until retirement to do these things, we did wait until we could pay with cash, until we had a decent emergency fund in place, until we had reached other goals. Because we did not go to Six Flags in 2003, we had 60 dollars to save. 60 dollars does not seem like much, but we made enough of those 60 dollar decisions to put a decent down payment on a house three years later.

We also carefully considered what we *did* do carefully. We both picked fuel efficient cars back in the day when when gas was .99 cents a gallon. Now the guy in the gas-guzzler beside me at the gas station tells me how “lucky” we are- filling the gas guzzler costs a pretty penny at $3.25 a gallon and he’s been trying to sell it, but nobody wants it with gas the way it is. Is it luck, or is it a result of choices made? A fairy godmother certainly did not appear and turn a pumpkin into a random car, for me or for him.

Luck is not magic, given only to certain people because they are better in some way. Luck is just another name for forethought. The good news is that everybody can change their luck, even just a little bit. I am well aware that there are situations that this is incredibly difficult. I am not blind to the issues that people have, but I also think that sometimes people use their issues as an excuse to not change. “Well, I’m already in a gazillion dollars of debt; I’ll never get out of it, so why try?” So they keep living their life without trying to change, even a little bit, and then lament how unlucky they are compared to people like me.

If we lived like we would always be poor and spent money because we did not know if we would have it in the future, we certainly would not be enjoying the blessings we have now. If we accepted the idea that credit card debt was unavoidable, we’d have newer clothes and would have had fun going on day trips with our friends, but we would not have our house yet. If my husband had spent his student loans on pizza, clothes, and trips to Cancun instead of taking out only what he absolutely had to for his tuition and what bare necessities he could not pay with his part time job, we’d owe a lot more now and would have gotten the first one paid off this early. We lived like no one else five years ago, so we’re an anomaly in our age group today- living like no one else. We are still making choices today that will hopefully increase our luck tomorrow. Luck is waiting for you too- you just have to invite it in.

Other Frugal Friday tips here.