arson summertime madness wintertime sadness

What’s super interesting to me about the thermostat to me is how it has this strange power that nothing else in our lives has. As it is, we pay about $200 a month in the winter to maintain 56, with occasional bumps up to 60 (15º C) when we’re in a treat yoself mood.Īnd we don’t have air conditioning, but I’m sure that if we did, we’d probably never turn it on in the summer, although we don’t really have any humidity in the mountains - see that bright blue sky for proof - so would only need it once in a while anyway. How high? Like north of $450, which was the first gas bill we received after moving in, using the setting the previous owners had left on the thermostat, which was an entirely reasonable 66 degrees (19º C). To us, it’s simple: energy is extra expensive in rural areas, we live in a cold place, ergo the natural gas bill in the winter would be unacceptably high if we heated our house to a more normal temperature. And that’s actually a habit we picked up well before we started blogging, before we had our retirement timeline set, before we ever thought we’d admit to the internet that we keep our house so cold. You’d think we are for-real-frugal, when in fact that’s our only real and true frugal habit. (That’s 13 degrees Celcius.) If that’s all you knew about us, you’d have a very skewed picture of our lives. And there is one example: the thermostat. I know a post is coming on this whole frugality tourist notion, but while that one keeps cooking in my brain, I decided to look at our lives and see if there was any area in which we truly are frugal, and ask what that means for us. Related post: Thinking About Frugality More Broadly // A Call to Action You only have to earn $33,000 annually in the U.S. (See where you rank on the Global Rich List. Yes, we have a high savings percent, but we also earn more than about 99.9 percent of the planet. Okay, sure, we spend less than other people in plenty of cases, but in lots of other cases we spend more. We never consider forgoing things we need, we only occasionally forgo things we want and our fill-the-bucket list is very full. ONL and I - not this blogging community.)īecause we really aren’t frugal by any reasonable definition of the word. Or, as I wrote to Penny last week in response to her brilliant post, the Privilege of Pretending, it feels like when we talk frugality, we’re really just being frugality tourists. I’ve been having weird feelings about the word “frugal” lately, especially after reading great posts by Pretend to Be Poor and Creating My Kaleidoscope about what frugality really means (hint: remember the Great Depression?). Amazing, right? We’ll never get sick of that! // Not that our sky is that blue every day, but that is what you get in the cold, dry mountain air, way up high.

Sidebar: That blue in the header photo has absolutely zero color correction or filter applied.

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Arson summertime madness wintertime sadness