Is frugality innate or learned?

Or can it be both innate and learned?

These are questions sparked by a trip down memory lane inside my brain! At no time in my life from birth through age 19 (when I got married) did I experience financial instability, but as I look back, I can see a pattern of interest in thrift and frugality.

I was thinking about how, as a kid, I saved the ends of our bar soap and pressed them onto the next bar of soap, even though I wasn’t buying the soap.

And then I thought about how in a Louisa May Alcott book, a character rummaged through the basement of the house, found some old curtains and other decor, cleaned and fixed them up, and used them to decorate her room beautifully.

I loved that part of the book when I read it as a kid!

I also remember reading the Boxcar Children books, and my favorite was the first one. My memory is vague about the exact circumstances, but I remember the children basically were dumpster-diving, finding old dishware and foraging for food, and I loved that.

(My abandoned house adventures felt a little like living the Boxcar Children story!)

As a teenager, I saved almost all of the money I earned from babysitting and teaching piano lessons, and I had a pretty decent nest egg saved up by the time I got married. I can even remember interestedly reading some Tightwad Gazette books on babysitting jobs (after I put the kids in bed!).

But none of this was forced on me by circumstances, and I honestly don’t think it was parental pressure either, because some of my siblings weren’t quite such die-hard savers. So, I think I am just maybe naturally inclined in this direction.

(I see this in my own kids as well; I remember Lisey considering a purchase when she was maybe seven years old. She carefully counted her money to see if she could afford it, because as she said, “I don’t want to be bankrobbed!” (Bankrupt. Hehe.) She too was born this way. 😉 )

Once I got married and moved out of my parents’ house, frugality was no longer a choice. I wrote a little more about this on my Patreon today, but I lived through a lot of very lean years during my marriage, and frugality skills are largely what kept financial disaster at bay.

Basically, I came into adulthood with something of a proclivity to frugality, but my adult years are when I got really good at stretching a dollar. So, I guess my frugality is both innate and learned (forced? Ha.)

If I had married into money, I’d probably still be practically minded and waste-averse. But since I lived the low-income life, I took the frugality thing a whole lot more seriously, and I got really good at it.

Things got better financially toward the end of my marriage, but then, as you know, I plunged back into lean times during the two years of separation/divorce proceedings. I was very grateful for my frugality skills again!

Currently, with no attorney fees and the addition of an RN degree, I’m back in a spot where frugality is a choice rather than a survival strategy. Yay!

However, I still keep my spending pretty low, I’m still waste-averse, and that will probably be the case no matter what my financial future holds.

(After all, what if you can have the thing you want AND keep your money?)

What about you? Is your frugality innate? Or did you learn it because you had to?