Introduction to Saving Money Masterclass

About an hour ago I got a text from my spouse while on break at work. Coworkers ask him to teach them how to save money, he tells me. And he doesn’t know to teach them. “I could teach master classes about it,” is my response. This blog section is my attempt to do just that.

We live in a corporatized world saturated in propaganda that titillates our basic needs and desires. We are endlessly bombarded with messages designed to massage our thoughts and feelings about what we need and want and what the corporate world can deliver in order to (temporarily) satisfy ourselves. We have been molded to work hard, earn money, and then spend all of that money on offerings from the corporations.

Sure, I could give a list of tips and tricks for saving money. (And I’m sure that this blog *will* contain such tips and tricks.) However, the key to “saving money” – or, as I prefer to call it, “conserving resources” – is to construct one’s own personal philosophy of how to interact with the world in order to meet one’s needs and wants. Break down the philosophies that have been constructed by advertisements and build up your own. Here are some ideas that you may want to include in your personal philosophy:

1. See waste as a resource.
2. Learn how to do for yourself.
3. Repair before replacement.
4. Be “loosely coupled” to the system. (Hat tip to Jacob Fiskar of Early Retirement Extreme for the name of the concept.)
5. Remove the stigma from “second hand.”
6. Value the resources that are intrinsic gifts of the planet on which we live.
7. Work within or cooperatively with living systems, enjoying the synergy that results.
8. And I’ll add more as they come to me.