You might spend an extra 15 mins a week looking for coupons that'll trim $0.25 off a package of toilet paper. But over the course of a year, you've only managed to save $13 -- at the real cost of 13 hours. That's not a good optimization if you believe an hour of your time is worth more than $1.

It's like changing all the double-quoted strings in your PHP script to single-quoted strings because you think it'll save a few cycles during parsing, when you really should be spending that time optimizing your I/0 calls.

There is saying: "Cheapness is the mother of misery"

Sounds like I'd want to be his friend. I live pretty cheap, but I'm not afraid to buy my friend a beer or a burrito. Social capitol is not about money, but about having friends to help you out with things.

And it seems that in business, being frugal at the beginning is important to keep your expenses in check, but eventually you have to spend money to make money.

My Dad lives pretty frugally, but he spends like $5K every year on a great trip somewhere (Turkey, Nepal, Africa, Europe, etc.) He could just save all that money up, but then he wouldn't have been all those great places. He could also do all the trip planning himself and probably save a couple grand, but doing it through a company makes the trip much smoother, and in the end, better.

I think a better mantra is to be as cheap as you need to be on the basics (ie don't waste money unnecessarily), but spend real money on things you really care about. If you love biking, save up for a great bike that you really want.

What?

Maybe it's because I'm in the UK, but I don't understand this at all - why would friends sponsor your new home? And what does it mean? Do they just buy all your stuff for you?

$2000 bed frame

WTF?

I've found plenty of times that the time and effort involved in saving that extra buck isn't worth a dollar.

And is that Comic Sans in his unsuccessfully comical starting picture?