My personal philosophy in life is that nothing is free. Good service always costs money. There is always a catch for something that is free. For example, I’ve always felt that the annual fee that I pay for my Amex charge card as I’ve always felt that they had better customer service and rewards “most of the time”.

It is with this background that I want to tell you about a few changes that Mrs Credit Card has made that actually increased our household expenses.

1. Firstly, we started taking and buying more organic food like milk, eggs, fruits and cheese. We realize that organic stuff cost more. In fact, in many cases, they cost almost half to twice as much. However, when they are on sale, they are only marginally more expensive.

2. We also install a water softener because Mrs Credit Card felt that the water was too hard and she wanted more “soap lather” when she was showering!

3. We also installed a water purifier under our sink and an extra outlet. This way, we can drink water straight from the kitchen tap when filtering it separately.

What did these changes do to our expenses? Well, as I mentioned earlier, organic food cost about 60% to double the price of conventional food. Our water bills also doubled! Having said that, both Mrs Credit Card and myself have no regrets to our decision. We feel we are eating better food and it is more convenient for us just to get clean water from our tap. Our earnings have also gone up the last couple of years and we feel this is a little “indulgence” (if this is even the proper term) is alright.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 4:05 am and is filed under Frugality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.