I've recently blogged about this topic - frugality vs frupidity. If you ever worked in some large bureaucracy (military, government, large corporations, etc) then you've probably encountered frupidity before. It's a mix of frugality and stupidity, an unholy abomination that appears to save money but ends up backfiring on you.
Neither "frupid" nor "frupidity" appears in any official dictionaries, which is a real shame... Here are a few examples:
Frugal: learning how to cook, making cool new recipes out of basic food staples (mmm, omelets…), eating whatever healthy delicious food is on sale (this week, it’s $1 for 1 lb of grapes!), and giving up expensive junk food (and soda) in favour of cheaper and healthier options.
Frupid: eating ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can buy 10 servings for $1, sure, and your grocery budget will be impressively small, but you’ll end up sabotaging your body with all that sodium and lack of actual nutrients.
Frugal: figuring out what exactly you need from a cellphone, then shopping around, finding a good deal on a good model (I use an Android Motorola phone with a fingerprint scanner, and I love it), and then sticking with it. Insure it or just use it until it breaks, then buy another one for ~$300 or so.
Frupid: buying a new version of iPhone every single year (what are they now? $700? $1,200?) even though a) the one you already have works perfectly fine, and b) the new model’s improvements are minimal. Ditto for all the other shiny consumer gadgets with huge PR campaigns, unless they’re legitimately necessary for your life, work, and/or business.
If you're a fellow Terry Pratchett fan, then you're probably already familiar with his great description of frugality vs frupidity:
What about you? What examples of frupidity can you share so we can laugh with you and learn from you?The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
If we're talking cash only, then Commander Vimes still has a great point.
