8 Unsexy Habits That Save Me Serious Money

There’s nothing sexy about money and there shouldn’t be.

Photo by ZINO on Unsplash

For some reason sold to us by Hollywood, romanticized wolves of Wall Street, and podcast bros with a big mouth, we imagine money is supposed to be sexy. The kind of interesting thing that makes your toes curl and your bank account swell up like an inappropriate erection. Wrong.

Money is supposed to be boring.

The biggest money is made in the most boring fields: things like finance, industrial supply, insurance. And it’s kept through the most boring habits: long-term investments, paying yourself first, living below your means.

Buffett built Berkshire on insurance and has been living below his means his whole life. Think about it.

Small money works the same way. Boring, repeatable, compoundable habits, day after day after day.

Here are mine.

1. I don’t have a morning routine.

I wake up like a normal person, go to the bathroom, feed the cats, stretch, scratch, slap some SPF, on and off to work.

The industry that sold you a $47 matcha whisk and a twelve-step skincare stack before 7AM is the same industry that needs you broke enough to keep buying.

Waking up and drinking tap water is free and fine. The routine is just an over hyped product they’re selling.

Think about what morning routine actually means when a woman with 500K followers says it on TikTok. It means: a $60 tongue scraper, a $90 silk pillowcase she wakes up on, a $200 red light panel that does literally nothing except glow red, a $40 collagen powder she stirs into a $12 celery juice (yuck!), and a cute journal from a brand called something like Intention Co.

That’s $400 before she’s brushed her teeth. She does this every day and she’s selling it to you as self-care, which is a word that used to mean taking your antibiotics and now means being a customer.

Now here’s my morning routine — very efficient, take notes.

I wake up. I drink water from the tap because I live in a country where you can. I feed the cats. I check if anything is on fire, financially or literally. Then I work. The routine is that there is no routine to sell you.

2. I run my closet like a business

Before anything, I let my clothes get old. Not in a capsule-wardrobe way — in a “this sweater is from 2019 and I don’t see how that’s a problem” way. The Zara haul girls are just cosplaying employment.

I resell when I get bored. Every May and October I do a closet cleanup and sell everything I haven’t used more than once the previous season. I only keep the things that spark joy.

I do the same about everything — things, jobs, places, relationships, people. It’s a rule that’s worked better than anything else in my life.

This May I made over $600 selling secondhand clothes and half-used perfumes on Vinted (the European equivalent of Poshmark or Depop). It’s like someone else is paying me to clean and organize my own closet.

The Zara haul girl, meanwhile, is unpacking $340 worth of polyester on camera for an audience that thinks she’s rich. She’s not though. She’s in debt. The haul is the job and the clothes are the props. In six months they’re at the flea market next to my home and I’m buying them for $4.

3. I don’t have subscriptions I forgot about.

Once a quarter I open my bank statement like it’s a crime scene and I’m the detective. Audible I never opened. A meditation app for the anxiety the meditation app gave me. Canva Pro because that one time when I needed it for one thing I could have done with a free app. It adds up to a small rent payment.

Subscriptions I keep because they’re worth it: Medium, YouTube Premium, Wondershare editing software, and utilities because if I went off the grid I’d be eaten by a bear within a week.

Everything else, gone. Adobe wanted $60 a month for a program I open twice a year. Gone. A newsletter I subscribed to because the first article was good and then the writer discovered she had opinions about sourdough. Gone. A cloud storage plan I’ve had since 2019 that I upgraded because I ran out of space and then never cleaned out the space. Gone, after I cleaned out the space, which took forty minutes and saved me $120 a year. That’s a math problem a child could do and I was losing to it for years.

The useless subscriptions economy works because $8.99 doesn’t feel like anything. Wrong! Eleven $8.99s a month is $100. That’s my grocery bill. For nothing.

4. I cook things that are boring.

Ingredient-wise, not taste-wise. Simple ingredients, packed with flavor. Beans. Rice. An egg. Repeat.

I eat fish with rice and cucumbers five times a week using different dressings. I call it a sushi bowl because I enjoy romanticizing my boring life. It tastes amazing, it’s good for you, and I can vary the taste with sauces, spices, dressings, and condiments.

Sushi is my favorite food, but it’s expensive and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to bother with all that laborious process. I’m a fiery writer with restless words that need to get out, not a sushi chef with the patience of a saint.

Thing is, that $18 green bowl is made of four ingredients you own. You’re paying that for someone to assemble your pantry into a bowl and hand it to you for a price.

And it’s not even better than what you’d make — it’s worse. It’s been sitting in a fridge under a lamp since 11AM. The dressing is in a plastic cup labeled House Miso because they know if they called it soy sauce and vinegar you wouldn’t pay and for good reason.

5. I don’t Uber everywhere.

There is only one exception: the airport, and that’s just because I always panic about not being there on time.

The rest of the time I own a cheap dingy car I paid in cash and even so, I still walk places people drive to. It’s one of the privileges of living in Europe.

The monthly cost of a car in America is roughly a second rent for the privilege of sitting in traffic listening to a podcast about how to be more frugal. The irony is wild.

In LA I watched a woman order an Uber to go three blocks because it was 4PM and she didn’t want to sweat before a meeting. The Uber took eleven minutes to arrive. She could have walked it in six. She was a producer at a wellness brand — I’m not making this up.

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6. I buy things secondhand and I’m not weird about it.

Almost exclusively if I can help it. Electronics too. Vinted, Facebook Marketplace, that huge flea market that happens every weekend a mile from my house. Someone else already ate the depreciation.

My phone is refurbished. My camera lens came from a friend who upgraded. My winter coat belonged to someone who spent more money than I ever would, which is exactly why she had to sell it and I got to buy it.

Also, my couch doesn’t know it’s used. It’s pre-sat-on, okay?

Everything in my apartment has a small history I don’t know and it’s fine. The idea that furniture should be new is a lie the furniture industry tells because a solid wood table lasts 80 years and they need you buying one every seven.

New is a marketing category. Nothing is new for very long. You are buying the illusion of first — first to sit on it, first to smell it, first to scratch it — It’s like we’ve got a virginity fetish. It’s creepy, really.

7. I don’t drink.

Or barely. A night out is $200 and a hangover. The wellness industry sells you the hangover cure and the hangover too. They’re often the same shareholders.

Alcohol is the only product I know of that costs money going in, costs money coming out, and costs you a workday on top.

You pay for the cocktails, the Uber home, the electrolyte packet in the morning, the greasy breakfast that fixes nothing.

If you’re really unlucky, you pay — mentally and emotionally — for the horror of waking up next to someone your alcohol-soaked brain deemed sex-worthy at 4AM; same person you said no to at 10 PM when you were still conscious.

It’s a $200 loss dressed up as Friday. Plus therapy.

8. I’m boring about money.

No crypto. No day trading. No side hustle that’s actually a pyramid scheme hiding behind a Notion template.

Index fund, writer/ YouTuber job, small apartment, no parties, quietly getting richer than the guy posting Lamborghini reels from a rental.

My side hustles are reselling my things and renting my other apartment.

The only things I pay a lot for are trips to other countries and concert tickets to rock bands I’m grateful are still in business.

That’s it — that’s the whole strategy — only keep what gives you joy, get rid of everything else. It’s not sexy, but it makes me enough money to do the sexy things that make life magic: living on my own terms, waking up to the sound of birds, not alarm clocks, making a living doing the things I love, trips wherever I choose, art, and music.

When money’s boring, everything else can be sexy.

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