I’ve been holed up in an AirBnB in the Outerbanks for several weeks now and for the first time since this spring, I’ve been buying groceries just for me.

At home, my dad will eat pretty much anything. Food doesn’t last long.

I am not the same. I had this grand idea I was going to eat really healthy that lasted pretty much through my first shopping trip.

A lot of food went bad.

I mean, not a ton, but probably about $10 worth.

The main problem I found is really the chicken. My easiest go to food is just to shred a rotisserie chicken. I can put it in salad. I can eat it with chips and guacamole. It’s the easiest meal.

I can’t eat a whole rotisserie chicken before it goes bad though.

The same is true of some bags of fruits and vegetables or if I make too much food and save several helpings for leftovers.

But I stubbornly buy these same foods each week because the easily chopped and prepackaged kinds seem like such a waste.

They’re more expensive.

And so I’ve been wrestling this week with the idea of spending more to waste less.

Paying an extra .75 cents can mean I don’t wind up throwing out half a rotten watermelon to get a container of precut watermelon that’s half the size of a full one.

Paying an extra $1.00 means I can get a precut vegetable medley to stir-fry with rather than a head of broccoli and cauliflower.

I’m pretty sure it actually makes sense to do this rather than to throw out tons of food (or eating twice as much as I want to), but 8 years into being fairly frugal me is not happy with this mindset.

Did any of you know the most popular article I ever wrote on this blog, the only one to go viral, was whether or not a MacBook was a frugal choice? Of course who doesn’t love a good Apple vs. everyone else debate?

Fun blogging fact, I wrote that post in like 20 minutes with minimal effort – those are always the posts that do well. If I spent weeks doing painstaking research for ya’ll, I’ll barely have anyone read that article. :oP

Well, what I decided back then was yes, because my MacBooks always lasted years longer than any PC I had owned up till that point.

Another example is joining a gym. You can tell me till you’re blue in the face that I can walk for free or watch videos on YouTube – but I won’t.

I might go to group yoga classes, especially If I like the people in the class. I will definitely swim my behind off (literally, hopefully, that’s the goal with the gym) and while I could jump in the local lake for free (ewwww), I know that paying for the gym will motivate me to go.

I like to do the math in my head about how much each swim costs. The first one of the month is $40, but if I go the next day, it’s down to just $20 and if I go 4 times the first week, it’s only $10. I try to get it under $2 a swim.

In the prepandemic world, I am way to scared to go in a public swimming pool these days. They’re disgusting under the best circumstances.

Sometimes paying a little more actually does make sense, even if it feels a bit gutting to do so at the time.