As promised yesterday, I plan to address the points from the link I posted one by one.
The first point is:
1. Frugal people plan ahead. Planning ahead may not, at first, seem like it has anything to do with money, but it really does. Frugal people plan ahead in many ways. They do things like plan out their meals for the week to save money at the grocery store, or more long term planning like knowing that they’ll need a new roof on the house in several years, and to begin saving for this expense now.
Frugal people live by the mantra that failure to plan is planning to fail. They’ve learned that taking steps now for anticipated future events helps make those future events easier to deal with. And typically those plans make it both easier in both time spent, and in money saved.
Question to ask yourself: What can I do today to make tomorrow and the future easier to deal with?
If you really want use this strategy to its fullest potential don’t just make those plans in your mind. Write them down!
I regard planning as one of my strengths and there is no doubt in my mind that it saves money. It also saves time and my sanity which are equally important to me.
I plan our meals, plan to combine errands in a single trip, plan what I will wear to work, plan what to pack for a holiday, plan future projects at home – there is no end to what we plan.
An example of long-term planning was when we began looking for our current home. This was over 10 years ago and I was still in my forties but one of the things that we considered was that it would have to have at least one point of ground-level access or be able to be relatively easily adapted to meet this requirement. Although we have numerous stairs to reach the verandah we know that this can be altered if required – we have a plan.
We are also changing and adapting our large garden to reduce the level of maintenance which will be required as we age. Putting in the effort now will reap rewards in years to come.
As a result of ensuring that we have sufficient rainwater storage as well as the installation of solar panels means that we are pretty well self-sufficient for water and electricity which minimises the ongoing costs of running our home.
As GMan regularly quotes from Baldrick in Blackadder, “I have a cunning plan”. The difference between Baldrick’s plans and ours is that ours are realistic and generally achievable. Even if things do not go quite according to plan you have a framework with which to start again.
organised castle 
Very true.
We had a plan that before we got too old and no longer able to make a choice that we would move from our two storey home to a single storey….well we did.
It was a big chore but I hate to imagine what doing this in ten years would be. I am just at retirement age now.
Now we live a little further out in a lovely area with views to the mountains.
Single level with stairs out the back BUT we don’t need to go that way. We have a remote drive in garage which is wonderful for rainy days and shopping and everyway in between.
Alexa-asimplelife from Sydney
Oh, Snap! As you know, I’m a big fan/practitioner of regular menu/shopping plans. We are also constantly planning, and (sometimes only attempting to) work our longer range plans. You have to be a little bit flexible. But successful significant examples include small, easy, immediate but long-term results, as well as more speculative, long-view results:
(1) My choice to plant as many perennial fruits/veg as possible, as and when space becomes available, to reduce efforts in later years, but still allow us to harvest our own produce if we become less able. And we get ‘free’ food now.
(2) When we added a 2nd bathroom to our house, we sited it on the ground floor, designed as a wet room to be elderly/disabled friendly. It’s also directly accessible from both the back garden and the garage, for those ‘I can’t wait another minute’ times, not even requiring removal of muddy footwear. Turns out this is also a major bonus when we have the occasional garden party. 🙂
(3) When having our solar panels installed, I insisted the engineers could ignore the anti-social overly tall (much higher than the houses) conifer hedge next door that was casting shadows on our roof, and only take the neighbouring roof lines into consideration, because someday, that hedge would come down. Sure enough, well under 10 years later, the hedge is gone. So not only do we enjoy the increased sunlight in our garden and in our back rooms (extending winter daylight by several hours per day), but we have also gained significantly more electrical generation at zero additional expense.
Looking forward to your next thoughts! 🙂