Well this was kind of funny. Some people were talking to me about relationships and what they feel is a good match in terms of an ideal couple. For the most part, there was a lot of talk about how what makes a good pair/couple is that each person can fill in the weaknesses of the other. Stereotypically, it’s like one person is good at cooking and the other at handy work.

Then a topic about finances came up and how apparently pairing up a guy and girl that is super frugal won’t work as you need at least one person that is the more sporadic spender, so to speak, as it keeps things unpredictable and exciting.

I found that a little silly personally and was then saying that I see tips and advices all the time about finances from married couples that seem to be very financially savvy when it comes to spending money. I was thinking too, isn’t it more likely that pairing up a frugal person with a sporadic spender will drive each other nuts more?

I saw something interesting the other day where there was a person who was a very frugal shopper and the type of deals she gets are pretty incredible. Example, she does coupon stacking to the moon it seems where she could easily walk out of a store with a basket full of items for a few dollars where most people could easily spend five times as much.

The interesting thing was that she still struggled to save money at the end of the day while living in a very paycheck to paycheck type of fashion. As it appeared, the ultimate reason is that with the money she saved using her savvy shopping skills her mentality was that since she saved so much money that means she has more left to buy extra things.

Example, imagine that you budgeted yourself $50 to buy a pair of shoe. For whatever reason, you found a store that sold it for $25. Hence, you saved $25. Now normally I would think that the good thing to do is to just walk out with the purchase and put your $25 in the savings. Instead, she would be inclined to spend it by now buying say some socks and a shoe shining kit. She figures value wise she originally thought she needed to spend $50 anyways and so this is like an added bonus.

I used to do that a lot when it came to getting better models of an item. Example, if I budgeted $1000 to get a computer that I wanted where I found that I am suddenly able to get it for like $800 then I was inclined to spend the extra $200 anyways on an even better computer. Afterwards I just realized how unwise that was.

I guess it was easier to learn for me since when it comes to high tech stuff things change so fast where like with the example above you would rather have that extra $200 for the even better stuff that currently exists. Be amazed at how much you can save just with little things like this.