Spend like a drunken sailor on the things that matter to you, but be a cheap fuck about the shit you don’t care about.
Having trashy taste has saved me tens, possibly of thousands of dollars, over a lifetime. I was raised to be frugal by parents who bought a shell of a Brooklyn house for $30K cash. My dad was in construction at the time and did the cement and interior work with a bunch of his Irish friends with totally legit visas. They could sell that house for close to a mil today. The family next door to us rented, but they were always decked out in designer clothes as opposed to my Aqueduct Flea Market bootleg metal shirts. Their dad drove a Caddy, my dad drove a Dodge Aries.
When I was thinking about college my parents instilled in me a notion that I could go wherever I wanted to…as long as I got a scholarship. I was a good student. I won the National Merit Scholarship, I would have gotten in to just about anywhere, but I didn’t want a student loan monkey on my back to study Literature. I couldn’t do Econ after the first class when I found out that students had to wear business attire. I have 37” long arms like a gorilla and can’t just grab a suit off the rack at the Salvation Army like regular sized people. I went to a SUNY school. It was fine. I had zero debt. I even got a grant to Study A Broad in England.
When I bought my first apartment at 26, it wasn’t in still-relevant lower Manhattan or up-and-coming North Brooklyn. I bought a 2 bedroom for under 200K in Saturday Night Fever Bay Ridge. When I sold that two years later and made a mint, I bought a place, not in a Williamsburg luxury building (although I was tempted), but in Kip’s Bay, a few blocks from Bellevue and next to a methadone clinic. When I drove, I drove a Sentra and a Saturn.
But the story that best exemplifies my frugality, even when it applies to others, is when my friend Vic Christopher offered to take me for a last meal anywhere in the city before I shipped off to England. Anything was on the table, Le Cirque, Chez Pierre, and he was angling for Peter Luger. Any of those would have been an awesome experience, but I threw a curveball.
I asked Vic to take me to McDonalds, but not just any McDonalds, the one across the street from the Nostrand Projects, so we could get an Arch Deluxe. I recognize how absurd this sounds, but I figured that the low cost/high taste ratio of the Arch Deluxe, McDonalds fries, and a fountain soda was exponentially higher than thick bacon, wedge salad, and steak at Luger’s. Vic’s mind was blown by this decision. That’s the most Ed Mac shit to have ever happened.
And we were just texting about it yesterday, so that meal is probably my most memorable of the 90s.
Point is, I am not a fancy motherfucker.
Because of that my fixed expenses are low I’m free to invest for my retirement. More importantly, I’m free to set money aside for the things I really love: travel, concerts, festivals, restaurants, and learning/taking classes. I do that shit without sweating it because I wear Levis jeans and Hanes t-shirts and Chucks and Docs and Vegan Sauconys. All of my tattoos have come with a friendly discount. I don’t have a mortgage and will not upgrade my apartment.
Spend like a drunken sailor on the things that matter to you, but be a cheap fuck about the shit you don’t care about.