Oscar Wilde said that indulgence was the luxury of the poor, while penury (or stinginess) was the luxury of the rich.

It seems to me that spending habits are backward sometimes. Claude Hopkins, the old advertising genius (he wrote Scientific Advertising) once wrote that you have to market luxury goods to the poor, not to the rich, since it was the poor that mainly bought them.

The psychology, as it was spelled out by Hopkins, was that poor people face deprivation constantly, so if they can afford certain small indulgences, they will take advantage of that oasis in an otherwise bleak, penny-pinching environment. The Avon company (ding-dong) survived and even thrived during the Great Depression by selling lipstick and small containers of perfume. Luxury items, sure. But affordable treats that brightened the day of housewives who were trying to figure out how to make meat loaf without the meat.

Lifestyles on TV

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Entertainment overload is partly to blame with our infatuation for gadgets and goodies. We're surrounded by a culture that constantly wants to entertain us, whether it's with music or movies or crime dramas or even sensationalized celebrity news. All of that exposes us to a world that's both fictional and yet reproducible. We want the stuff we see! We want the cars, the perfumes, the lifestyles.

The lifestyles are the most amazing fantasies. Remember the old show Married with Children? Al Bundy worked in a shoe store and supported a stay-at-home spendthrift wife and two teenage kids. He owned his own home. True, the show portrayed the family as being strapped for cash, but Bundy could not have possibly earned enough to own a two-story home in Chicago.

Friends was another one. Apartments in Manhattan rent for four figures, and that's generally for a closet. The characters in Friends had marginal and intermittent jobs, but they managed to rent enormous Manhattan apartments. I know, I know. Friends lovers will tell me one of the shows explained that the apartments were rent controlled. But how do you explain the other apartments? Phoebe had her own place, so did Ross, and so did Joey and Chandler. So Rachel and Monica's place was rent controlled, but what about the rest? Besides, I'm pretty sure that in real life they wouldn't have been able to get away with that kind of sublet of a rent-controlled space.

The point is, we see life as it is not and we want to try to duplicate it. I think I liked the old I Love Lucy shows for their authenticity. Ricky was an entertainer and probably made some decent money, but Lucy didn't work and New York (then as now) wasn't cheap. Their apartment was little. When the baby arrived, it got crowded. When Fred and Ethel came to dinner, they had to set up some kind of makeshift table in the living room.

The Art of Deprivation

Being frugal is one of those things that sounds good to some people but sounds really hurtful to others. I don't know where we got the attitude, but some of the people in my life act as if it would be a serious act of deprivation--I mean pain--if they had to economize a little.

I recently brought in some cake for a group meeting. I also brought plastic forks and plastic plates. It was one of those indefinable group things where you don't know if five people will show up or 25, and I was not sure what plates and forks might be available. It turns out the facility had plastic forks, did not have plates, and everybody (only 14 of us) scarfed down all of the cake.

I wash plastic forks normally. You can really use them over and over. Now some people would say that washing them defeats their purpose. They were meant to be disposable.

Same thing with the cake pan. It wasn't that expensive, maybe a buck and change, but it was perfectly serviceable.

Everything got tossed out by the people who were helping with the group. I didn't say anything, because I know they were kind enough to help me and they were just doing what they always did. It's waste in the pursuit of convenience.

The only reason I can think that people rush to dispose of things is that they perceive the act of re-use as a form of inconvenience. However, if you really do use something twice (like a cake pan), it's not nearly as inconvenient as you think. In fact, look at it this way. If I had saved the pan and washed it out, I would not be inconvenienced by having to buy another one the next time I brought cake to a meeting.

Shopping is not an inconvenience; washing is. Where did we get that idea?

Furthermore, a lot of folks consider the very art of having to wash and re-use stuff as a form of deprivation. We want to new things!

A long time ago, somebody (not me) brought this up to a mutual friend, who hooted and hollered that the "somebody" was so off his rocker that he washed plastic utensils. Although meant in good fun, the attack was so shattering that several people in the room warned me in hush tones not to ever try to re-use anything in front of this particular guy.

He felt that it was just not appropriate for people of his particular station to have to contend with such trivialities as washing and re-using items. Did he go out and buy new? Yes. That was not an inconvenience, that was suitable to his station.

Can a person slash debt by washing plastic forks? Of course not. But it's a mindset thing. The kind of person who washes and re-uses plastic forks is the kind of person who thinks boldly past issues of convenience and deprivation and values money more than her own "pride."

Washing Zip-Lock Bags

It always kills me how people think that washing out and saving a plastic storage bags is a dumb idea. One person said, "I'm poor, but I ain't that poor!" Somebody else looked at me like I was the red-headed stepchild at the family reunion.

But it makes sense to re-use everything you can. Think of it this way. Imagine if you had a coupon that said, "Buy one box of gallon-size plastic food storage bags and get four boxes free!" People would love that coupon. But if you rinse out and re-use those bags four times (and just about anybody can get five uses from one of those bags), that's what you got.

It's just not glamorous. It's more fun flashing coupons. But it works.

Let me put it another way. Let's say, just for the sake of easy math, that it costs you 10 cents to buy one plastic storage bag. If you use it once and toss it, it costs you 10 cents.

But let's say you wash it when you're hand washing some dishes. You're not making special dishwasher, you're just letting the baggie get in on a free dip. Swish, swish, you're done. You rinse it off and set it out to dry. (Put chopsticks in a dishrack; they work great to hold the baggie as it air-dries.)

Total time invested, 10 seconds. I'm not counting the time that the baggie spends drying out. But you washed it out without costing you anything (used dishwater, some rinse water, drying time on your counter).

If that bag cost you 10 cents, you have now saved yourself 10 cents by investing 10 seconds of your time. If your time is worth a penny a second, your time is worth $36 an hour. That would be equivalent to earning $74,880 a year. Not bad for some used dishwater.

If you wash that bag out a second or third time, your savings get compounded.

That's one of the great secrets of saving money by living smart. It isn't glamorous!