Frugal Babe

Like most females, I have always loved clothes.  I love shopping for new (used) clothes, trying them on, bringing them home, wearing new (to me) stuff.  Since I buy 95% of my clothes in thrift stores, I’ve never been a big spender when it comes to my wardrobe (a huge shopping spree for me is about $40).  But over the last few years, since we got a huge thrift store about half a mile from our house, I’ve been there at least once every two weeks.  I usually spend between $10 and $20 a trip.  Not exactly breaking the bank, but our house was definitely starting to feel full.  A new coat here, a pair of shoes there, and pretty soon I was using not only my half of the closet in our room, but most of the closet in the guest room aswell.  So I decided I didn’t need any more clothes for a while.  I didn’t put any strict time frame on it, I just decided to see how long I could go without buying clothes.  From the beginning of October until last week, I went to the thrift store once.  Not bad, considering my usual 2 or 3 times a month routine.  Last week, my brother and his girlfriend came over for dinner.  Afterwards, they suggested we hit the thrift store, so I went, but I didn’t buy anything.  I didn’t even have to try.  I just didn’t need anything, and I found I no longer had a desire to buy stuff just because it was there.

Today, I went to the thrift store to drop off a bunch of stuff that I no longer need.  Stuff that’s just been cluttering up our house.  I had recently gotten rid of our aluminum pans, and was on a mission to find stainless steel cookware (but not willing to pay $50 a pan…)  So I decided to venture into the store to see what they had in the cooking section.  I used to just browse in thrift stores, and find stuff that I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it.  But today I had a purpose.  Most of the pots and pans had scratched non-stick surfaces, but then I found two heavy duty stainless steel Ekco saucepans, exactly the right size, for a total of $4.  I didn’t even look at the rest of the store - why bother, when I had found what I needed already (the old me would have kept browsing for another half hour).

My thrift store habit has never been a large part of our monthly expenditures - it was always about $40/month.  So cutting it way back isn’t going to make us millionaires.  But it will make our house seem bigger.  Especially if I keep making trips to the thrift store to drop off donations - without going inside.