Don't confuse frugality with cheapness.

Yesterday morning I was looking through my book collection, and I realized there was utterly nothing there that I wanted to read. This led me to a few decisions I could make:

1. Do nothing at all and give up reading as a hobby until I could get some books for free.

2. Re-read books I had read before and sacrifice a significant amount of mental stimulation.

3. Just cave in to my impulses and buy a few books to read.

I thought about doing the first two, but as I scoured some of my old books I realized they just didn't do anything for me anymore. Maybe sometime down the line, but as for right now, at this very moment, I need to read something new or else my mind will remain completely stagnant. I need to read something that's relevant to our times and not to people 50 or 100 years ago.

So, I immediately decided to scour ebay and amazon for cheap novels, and spent $24.34 (including shipping) on three.

This is where the main point of this article comes in.

If you feel like you are sacrificing the things you truly enjoy just to be frugal, why be frugal at all? Are you simply saving money just to save money? Or are you trying to save money to eventually improve the quality of your life?

Now I'm not saying that you should go out and buy impulsively, it took me a little while before I decided to cave in and buy those books. And when I did, I was sure to look for the best deals online rather than go straight to the retail bookseller, which probably would have cost me about double the amount I spent online.

If you're a guitar player and you need to buy new strings, don't just wait around miserably playing your jankcity guitar over and over again, that won't be fulfilling at all. Go buy some new strings, but be sure to get the best deal you can on them. What I'm preaching here is to balance frugality with happiness, or else you will end up a miserable old miser with no hobbies and no passions to spend his/her money on. People who live without passions are practically the living dead, so be sure to develop the hobbies you enjoy while you're still young (or at least, during the precise moments you are passionate about them) or else you will simply lose the love of what you are doing.

Or, at least, it won't be as strong.

Remember, time is as valuable an asset as money, perhaps even more important. If you don't spend time doing the things that you enjoy, and you simply just want to save money just to say you have money, you aren't truly living.

Be frugal, and be happy.