Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Can you put into words the difference between being cheap and being frugal?

As a consignment or resale shopkeeper, you run across situations all the time where I would define being frugal as protecting your hard-earned money by looking for ways to get the highest value from everything you buy. -MoneyUnder30.com
you have to choose between frugality and cheapness.

David Weliver of MoneyUnder30.com is the source for this sidebar quote on what frugal is…

And what is cheap?

Being cheap is blowing your hard-earned money on something that won’t do what you want it to, like a low-quality chair that will fall apart. Being cheap also means NOT spending money even when it is to your advantage to do so. It’s all about intentions, expectations and investment.

Being frugal in our resale industry to me means absolutely maximizing the value of every dollar I spend and being cheap is compromising on quality.

For example, if I buy hangers for my shop simply because they are cheap, and my dollars are wasted when the hangers consistently break (and sometimes even damage the clothes on them)…that’s cheap. Finding a source for quality hangers that will make my dollars go further and fulfill my intention of making my goods look great, is frugal.

In business, spending wisely is spending as an investment. To publish an ad or a web site that is amateurish and ineffective, because it’s cheap is not an investment in your shop. (It might even damage your reputation.) Cheap is spending –or not spending!–money in such a way that your objective isn’t reached. It’s WASTING the money spent because it’s not an investment.

And like David says frugal is getting the most for your hard-earned money.

I used to say to a customer who was hesitating over purchasing an item she really wanted that “Money’s only good for one thing: you can’t eat it, you can’t wear it…all you can do is SPEND it.”

Just be sure that you do, indeed, spend your hard-earned money frugally, not cheaply.