When Carl and I went on the I Will Teach You To Be Rich podcast with Ramit Sethi, we thought we were going in for a fun conversation about money. What we walked away with instead was a full audit of our own frugality, and honestly, it stung a little.
For years, we told ourselves our tight spending habits hadn’t cost us anything. We weren’t missing out, we were being smart. In reality, we were just being cheap and calling it a personality trait. That podcast cracked something open, and we started experimenting with spending money differently. Not recklessly. Not with no plan. But with a genuine question in mind: does this purchase make my life better, easier, faster, more comfortable, or more fun? If the answer is yes, we’ve started saying yes back.
This shift didn’t happen overnight, and it definitely didn’t happen without some “discussions.” But a few years into this experiment, I can tell you it’s been one of the more interesting things we’ve done with our money, and I want to walk you through what it’s actually looked like in practice.
The Vacation Experiment
Travel was our first testing ground, mostly because it’s where our old habits were the most obvious. We used to book connecting flights to save $20, land at 11pm with two exhausted kids, and call it a win because we’d been financially responsible. We were not responsible. We were tired and cranky and $20 richer.
So we made some rules. No flights before 10am or after 7pm. Nonstop whenever it’s available, regardless of how many $20 bills we’re technically leaving on the table by not doing three layovers through cities we have no interest in visiting. Economy Plus for any flight over 3 hours. Business class for international flights.
And here’s the one that felt the most indulgent at first: when we travel with our girls, we now book two hotel rooms instead of cramming everyone into one. I cannot overstate how much this has changed our trips. Nobody’s whispering at 8pm because someone fell asleep. Nobody’s tiptoeing around in the dark trying to find their toothbrush. We get actual conversations with our kids without worrying about whether we’re going to wake anybody up, and then we get an evening that feels like ours again.
None of this was necessary in the survival sense. We were fine before. But “fine” and “actually enjoying the trip” turned out to be two very different things, and we’d been settling for fine for a long time.
Paying Someone Else to Do the Thing You Hate
Here’s a fun fact about me: I hate cleaning. Not in the mild “nobody loves scrubbing a toilet” way that everyone hates cleaning. I mean I actively drag my feet, find seventeen other things to do first, and turn a two hour job into an entire lost weekend because I simply cannot make myself start.
We hired a cleaning woman who comes every other week, and it has been one of the best money decisions we’ve made. My house looks spectacular on a schedule now, and I got my weekends back. I’ve talked about this before because it genuinely bears repeating: this is not a luxury for people who are too lazy to clean their own homes. This is buying back hours of your one wild and precious life that you were spending in a state of low grade dread.
If there’s a task in your life that you avoid, resent, or half-do because you can’t stand doing it, that’s worth a hard look. The money you spend outsourcing it might be the best money you spend all year.
Building a House Without Pretending We Had a Budget Ceiling
This year we finished building our dream house, and it turned into the biggest test of this whole “spend on purpose” philosophy we’ve had yet.
Here’s the thing about building a house: it is an endless parade of decisions, and every single one of them can be made two ways. The cheap way or the way you actually want. Multiply that by a few hundred choices and you start to understand why home builds destroy marriages and budgets in equal measure.
We made a decision early on that we were going to choose based on look, function, and desirability, not on price. This was, and I cannot stress this enough, a genuinely hard thing for two people who have spent their whole marriage looking for the discount. Carl and I had more than one conversation that started calm and ended with someone saying some version of “but do we NEED that?”
We didn’t try to fit the house into a specific budget number. We had a loose sense of what things would cost, but we didn’t let that number make our decisions for us. That’s a scary sentence to write, and it was a scarier way to live for about a year. But it also meant we ended up with a house that actually reflects what we wanted instead of a house built entirely around what we were willing to argue about.
Not everything got the upgrade treatment, though. We have good appliances, not top-of-the-line ones, because neither of us cared enough about that particular line item to fight for it. That’s the other half of spending intentionally: figuring out what you genuinely don’t care about so you can stop spending decision-making energy (and money) there.
For the architecture, we skipped the custom-design route, which typically runs about 10% of your total build cost, and found a company called Truoba.com that sells ready-made modern house plans. They’re customizable, which meant we could take a floor plan we loved and adjust it to fit our lot and our must-haves: a big pantry, a wide garage, and a separate entrance to the basement apartment. We host a lot of people at our house, and the finished home is actually a duplex, built for exactly that kind of life.
The Kitchen Fight (Yes, an Actual Fight)
If you want to know how deeply frugality can be embedded in a person, let me tell you about our kitchen.
We’ve built two Ikea kitchens successfully in past homes, so naturally we went to Ikea again for this one. And we either got the single worst kitchen designer in the history of Ikea or the man was having the worst day of his career, because the design he handed us looked cheap. Not “budget friendly.” Cheap.
I told Carl we were not doing that design. I said I was going to go talk to Home Depot’s design team and see what they could put together instead. Carl, ever the voice of our old frugal selves, said, “Well, not if it’s going to cost twice as much.”
Reader, it cost twice as much.
We went with it anyway, because it was genuinely beautiful and fit the whole feel of the house in a way the Ikea design never would have. And honestly, that exchange is basically our entire spending journey in one conversation. The instinct to protect the money is still there. It probably always will be. The difference now is that the instinct doesn’t automatically win.
One of the things I’m most excited about in the new kitchen is the island. It’s enormous, with workspace for up to 12 people, because we host parties and I love to cook. (Yes, I love to cook but I don’t need a $15,000 oven.) I’ve already got plans to bring in a chef for cooking lessons around that island. That’s not a purchase that increases our net worth. It’s a purchase that increases our fun, and I’ve decided that’s allowed to count too.
The Most Boring, Most Important Purchase of All: Organization
Here’s the spend that surprised me the most. For our entire married life, Carl and I have been disorganized. Not messy exactly, but chaotic in that specific way where you own something, you know you own it, and you have absolutely no idea where it is. We wanted to be organized. We just never had the time, because we were always moving at full speed, and organizing felt like a project for some future, calmer version of ourselves who never actually showed up.
As we’re moving into the new house, we’re doing it slower and with a lot more intention. We’re thinking about where each item should actually live instead of shoving it wherever there’s an open shelf. We’re spending real money on storage totes and a labeling system so there’s never a question of where something goes or where to find it.
Typing that out, it sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Of course you should put things where you can find them. Of course you should label your bins. But we spent decades in go-go-go mode, and “organize the linen closet” always lost to whatever felt more urgent that day. Spending money to finally solve that problem, once, properly, might be some of the best money we spend in this entire house.
And yes, our mental, embedded frugality (or let’s be honest, cheapness) has caused us to have more than one “discussion” about the cost of this organization system, too.
What This Whole Experiment Actually Taught Us
Looking back at everything we’ve changed, from the flights to the cleaning woman to the house itself, the pattern is the same every time. We’re not spending more money because we suddenly stopped caring about our finances. We’re spending more money in the specific places where it makes our actual daily life better, and we’re staying just as careful everywhere else.
That’s the part that took me the longest to understand. Frugality isn’t the enemy. Mindless frugality is the enemy, the kind that says no to everything by default because saying no feels responsible, even when the yes would have cost you very little and given you a lot.
If you take one thing from our experience, let it be this: look at the parts of your life that drain you, whether that’s a chore you hate, a travel schedule that wrecks your family, or a house full of things you can never find, and ask whether money could fix it. Sometimes the answer is no. But sometimes the answer is yes, and you’ve just been too frugal to notice.
So, how have you used money to improve your life? I’d genuinely love to know.
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