3 April 2008 144 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

It seems that many personal finance gurus focus on expounding on the same frugality tips over and over again. I’d never suggest that these tips aren’t useful — I think these tips are popular because they work. They can make a significant difference in most people’s finances, especially those who are starting out with minimal knowledge of the topic.

But, at the same time, there are only so many times that I find hearing a tip useful. Brown bagging my lunch is a great example — I’ve been brown bagging my lunch for a while. I even pack my boyfriend’s. I still hear, repeatedly, though, that it’s a crucial piece of advice. I’ve gotten the concept! I’m ready to move on!

So where can we go from simple tips for improving our personal finances through frugality? After a person gets their expenses under control, most personal finance gurus point towards eliminating debt as the next step. I have no problem with this, or even the oft repeated suggestions to snowball payments. After all, simple tricks often work best. But I do feel that something is missing from this approach. It seems like a lot of personal finance writers practically ignore the idea of building up your income. The general idea seems to be that, if you’ve minimized your spending through frugality, you’ve got all the money you need.

In some cases, that’s true. For some people, simply getting spending under control can be enough to solve every money woe. For many of us, though, there is far more to our money situation than that. We’re trying to be debt free, but still save for big things we know are coming down the line: houses, kids, all of that. And some incomes just can’t stretch that far. There are people living on a grand a year, but that’s not the lifestyle most of us want.

Instead, we need to think about building income (and therefore a certain amount of wealth) at the same time we’re following all those tips to live more frugal lives. We need to think about where our careers are going, whether entrepreneurship works for us, even the basics of improving a business. A person interested in his own finances can’t limit himself to reading the personal finance bloggers, authors and experts. Instead, he needs to be reading about business, careers, self-improvement. It’s time to move beyond brown bagging our lunches and on to figuring out how sell a few more widgets.