I can be frugal too

I’ve read a lot of posts on various blogs about being frugal. I’ve never been one to worry about my spending until about a decade ago when I decided to stop spending more money than I made. Since then I’ve been a lot better with money but it’s only been the last year or so when I’ve really started to think of myself as being more frugal than I used to be. I’m still not very frugal by a long shot but I thought I would share an example of where I wanted to buy something pretty expensive but in the last year or so I changed my mind and choose something much cheaper.

When we bought our new house I had my heart set on getting a natural gas line run to the back of the house and buying a natural gas bbq. The main benefit of natural gas over the normal propane is that you will never run out so you don’t have to go and get the tank filled up every so often. We did get the gas line run but I didn’t buy the bbq because we were too short of money. I never did price out the natural gas bbqs but I’ve heard they are at least $500 which is a lot of cash.

This year the “new me” decided that it wasn’t worth it to buy the more expensive bbq and I would get a cheaper propane one instead. A couple of months ago Loblaws (local grocery store) had bbqs for $100 so I grabbed one. I have to say that this bbq is one of my best purchases ever. It was relatively easy to assemble and works great. My old bbq was not that safe anymore, was much hotter on one side than the other and it used to shoot a lot of flames at me while I was trying to cook which I didn’t much like! The new bbq is the same size as the old one, very hot, perfectly even temperature and although the food doesn’t taste any better, it’s a lot easier to cook without burning everything. I still have to fill up the tank once in a while but there is a gas station just around the corner from where I live so it’s no big deal.

I have to conclude that I’m happier with the cheap propane bbq than I would have been with the expensive natural gas version.