A few years ago, I wrote about four frugal things I had done lately and why thinking about how I spend and whether I do it intentionally was a reminder that I can live in the moment while also making sure I’m still preparing for my future.

As one of my examples in that column, I wrote that we had “traveled to a faraway land and stayed at luxury hotels while, at the same time, washing our clothes in bathroom sinks instead of spending $50 on getting somebody else to do our laundry.” The difference between frugal and cheap might be a matter of semantics, but even if you make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, saving tens of dollars here and there can make you feel like you’re making wise decisions with your money. Plus, who doesn’t like bragging about washing socks and undershirts in a hotel bathroom?

At WCICON26 (which you can watch in our Continuing Financial Education 2026 course), I talked to a number of attendees and speakers about the most frugal thing they had done recently, and I loved some of their answers. I’ve kept them anonymous so they could be as honest as possible.

Here’s what they said.

The Most Frugal Thing You’ve Done Lately

  • I arrived in Las Vegas for WCICON and tried to use the AMEX Centurion lounge in the airport with my AMEX Business Platinum card, even though I knew it was only for departing flights, not arriving flights. I did it anyway just to get a free meal before I came to the conference. My husband said I would be denied, but I said, “I’m cute; let me try.” They said, “Denied.” So, I had to buy my dinner.
  • I’m not staying at this hotel. I found the cheapest Airbnb I could find. When I was booking the conference, this hotel would have been a lot of money. I’m paying $700 for five nights at this Airbnb.
  • I don’t do it a lot, but I was good at doing an online grocery order at Aldi. It’d be 80-something bucks for us for like a week. I was really proud of that. It was crazy cheap.
  • I’m the one who loves spending but also turning our CME trip into a vacation. We love to travel. This is a cheap way to travel. My hospital has CME dollars that I can use to pay for a conference. That paid for this trip, so we turned it into a vacation. It feels like at least 50% off a vacation. Maybe more like 80% off a vacation.
  • An acquaintance of mine had an old Cadillac that he was wanting to get rid of. This was years back. He was in a position where he didn’t want to deal with things. He was just going to take it to the scrapyard. I knew that car had some value and some money in it. It was in decent condition. I bought it for like $275. I detailed the interior. I replaced a couple of things. And I flipped it for $6,000.
  • Streaming services, right? We can have six or seven of them. My big idea was to subscribe to one at a time. Subscribe for the content of one service, watch it all, cancel, and subscribe somewhere else. Then, when you circle back to the first streamer, it’s a new season of what you wanted to watch. Over a year, it probably saves $700-$800. Maybe even $1,000.
  • You know the blue towels in ORs that [medical instruments] go on? My husband brought home a box of unused ones and washed them all. Now, they’re our cleaning rags. We use them and throw them away.
  • A core part of our life is that we like to cook. We’re not doing it for frugality’s sake per se, but it’s certainly a whole lot less expensive. I’m vegetarian, and I have celiac disease so I’m gluten-free. We make a lot of Asian food—lots of fish and veggies, Thai curries, things of that nature. It’s not so much the money thing; we both just like doing it. We enjoy doing it together.
  • Instead of buying a new WCI shirt, my wife cut this one up and crocheted it. She’s been trying to repurpose my old shirts.

dulce wcicon

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This attendee, Dulce, then gifted that shirt to my wife, so it’s now at my house in all of its glory.]

  • When I had just graduated from college, a friend gifted me a Toyota Camry. Over the process of the next year or two, it stopped going in reverse. I would always pull through in all places to park, or I would never flip a U-turn unless I knew I had enough room in the road. I was on a first date once, and I made a mistake, a miscalculation. I had to open the door and push with one leg to get the car to back up. It was the first and only date. It obviously didn’t impress that person.
  • I don’t have a car. I lived in New York City for 12 years; that was when I gave up my car. I find it peaceful and therapeutic. But I didn’t miss it. I moved to Denver and had to get a car again. I returned to Philadelphia, which is one of those cities where you can have a car but you don’t need to have a car. I got rid of it. I don’t have to worry about insurance. I don’t have to worry about upkeep. The amount I spend on public transportation, Ubers, or just walking is better for my financial health, my physical health, and my mental health.
  • I like to thrift. It’s not for the financial reasons, but it’s more for the consumerism of clothes. I’m not trying to save money, but there’s higher quality in older pieces. I just picked up this crazy nice cashmere sweater at Goodwill for like $8. It’s a $400 sweater. I’m not trying to save money; it just happens to be there.
  • We never upgraded my starter/junior attending home. I kind of got priced out. It’s not like I was trying to be frugal. Because of that, I’ve been able to spend more mindfully in terms of having the money to do the Mega Backdoor Roth and to travel.
  • I just got back from a one-mile hike to Total Wine and a one-mile hike back with a 15-pack and a 12-pack of craft beer for the pool for the afternoon. It was frugal that I walked there, and the beers were only $1.50 a piece instead of $15 or whatever it would cost at the hotel.
  • This morning, I intentionally had breakfast at the hotel that I’m staying at instead of just coming here and having a free breakfast. I had money from the credit card that was free that I hadn’t used. I had breakfast there, because I had to use this money or it would disappear. Breakfast would have been free either way. But if I ate there, I wouldn’t lose the money I had in theory.
  • Every time I drive by Costco and see that long, long line for gas, I wonder to myself, “Is it worth it to wait 20 minutes in line to save a couple of bucks?” I decide “Absolutely not,” and I pretentiously drive on by. And then a week later, I’m the doofus waiting in line, watching all the cars drive by who must think I’m an idiot for waiting so long to save a couple of bucks. So, I guess I’m undecided on whether any of this is worth it.
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Money Song of the Week

In preparation to see Linda Perry open for the Indigo Girls last month, I perused her recent setlists to see if she played What’s Up, the 1993 hit she sang when she fronted 4 Non-Blondes. I assumed she would still be singing that iconic tune as a solo artist. It was, after all, her biggest hit and continues to live in the cultural zeitgeist (even my teenagers have heard the song!). What’s Up, however, was not listed in her most recent performances as the Indigo Girls opener.

I thought that was strange, but then again, I recently saw Pat Benatar live, and she didn’t play one of her megahits, Hit Me with Your Best Shot, because she believed it hadn’t aged well and now sent the wrong message. Maybe, I thought, Perry doesn’t play What’s Up for personal (or political) reasons like that.

Sure enough, she didn’t play it during her 45-minute opening set. It was a little disappointing. But then, about 90 minutes later, she appeared during the encore of the headliner Indigo Girls, and as Perry began strumming the opening chords of What’s Up, it all made sense.

We learned that EVERYBODY (Perry, Emily, Amy Ray, the Indigo Girls’ violinist, the other guest musicians on stage, and everybody in the theater) was going to sing What’s Up together. If you had asked me before the show about the chances of me getting slightly misty-eyed as thousands of people sang, “And I said, “Heyyayyyeaeeaaahhh,” in celebration of whatever that means, I would have said the odds were slight.

I would have been wrong.

Either way, the moment, as you can see below, was powerful.

@patricecavalier7

@Linda Perry singing @4 Non Blondes What’s Up with @Indigo Girls at ACL 🤯😭💜

♬ original sound – CajunCavalier⚜️🤠

It got me thinking. We’ve had a few physician friends over the past few years leave their clinical jobs for other positions inside medicine. I went to a recent karaoke party for one of the docs giving up her patients that was emotional and filled with songs like Boyz II Men’s It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday and John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads. The night featured liquor and tears.

But maybe What’s Up should have also been played on that karaoke night, because to me, it’s a song about faith for the future despite the current despair. Yes, the song is about hopelessness and confusion (and maybe it’s also about paternalism and homophobia), especially when Perry sings,

“Twenty-five years and my life is still/Tryin’ to get up that great big hill of hope/For a destination.

I realized quickly when I knew I should/That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man/For whatever that means.

And so I cry sometimes when I’m lying in bed/Just to get it all out, what’s in my head.”

Sounds pretty gloomy, huh? She finishes the chorus by singing,

“And so I wake in the morning and I step outside/And I take a deep breath and I get real high/And I scream from the top of my lungs/’What’s going on?’”

Yes, maybe that’s a cry of confusion and anger, but during that Indigo Girls show, I saw it as a yell of hope. The “What’s going on?” part doesn’t have to be a shout of bewilderment into the chasm of a confusing life, where the morning sun makes you sweat and burn. It could be a roar of optimism into the face of your current desolation, where the warmth of the sunshine renews the spirit you feared might have been gone forever.

And for those docs who leave their burnout-producing jobs, where you can never leave on time and where you have to wonder how you’ll survive the next 20 years of the grind, and find comfort (and maybe just as much money) in 9-to-5 stability, perhaps the last few lines of the song (which were also the first few lines) provide affirmation that you’re doing exactly what’s right for your life.

“Twenty-five years and my life is still/Tryin’ to get up that great big hill of hope/For a destination.”

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Reel of the Week

If you’ve ever written a book (or had kids), you know the struggle is real.

What’s the most frugal thing you’ve done lately? How did that frugality make you feel? Or are you more of the YOLO type?

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