In my last installment of Practical Epicureanism, I discussed Cheap Fun—providing ten ideas for ways to inexpensively enjoy the widely available pleasures of life. Today, I have another list of ten for you: ten categories in which many residents of the developed world also make their lives more expensive than they need to be, not through any particular desire for more extravagant options, but simply because they fail to practice any reasonable degree of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Doing a little prudent comparison shopping when it comes to things like choosing insurance, deciding your financial arrangements, or obtaining various services of modern life can often provide significant relief from various kinds of money worries, from the most pressing (how will we pay the bills this month?) to the most long-term (when can I retire?).
Why does such a discussion belong in a philosophy newsletter? Because Epicureanism gives a uniquely large amount of attention to practical matters, seeing them as vital elements in leading a happy and untroubled life. Consider this central passage in the Letter to Menoeceus:
Every pleasure is good, and is by nature fitting for us, but not every pleasure is to be chosen. In the same way, every pain is bad, but not every pain is to be avoided. Indeed, all things should be judged through comparison, and through a consideration of their advantages and disadvantages. (LM 129)
Epicurus insists on the importance of making all our decisions against the backdrop of a “comparison of advantages and disadvantages,” or “weighing of pros and cons” (symmetrisis kai sympheronton kai asymphoron; συμμέτρησις καὶ συμφερόντων καὶ ἀσυμφόρων). The judgments we are most often called to make are not those dealing with the obscure philosophical problems of the modern academy, not questions of morality, metaphysics, or epistemology, but with the comparison of hedonic possibilities which we encounter in our daily lives. This is no small matter. Every one of our decisions has the potential to bring our lives more pleasure or more pain. Developing skill in such decisions will naturally influence the levels of joy and disturbance you experience from day to day.
Some people face truly precarious circumstances, with threats to their ability to obtain food, maintain secure housing, or retain the general respect of society. Epicurus recognizes such things as real impediments to happiness. For people facing such risks, the items below can be of real use in easing financial pressures, and gradually building up financial reserves that reduce the threat of such negative outcomes.
Other people face milder financial constraints, but turn their comparative lack of affluence (there are always more affluent people with whom we can compare ourselves) into sources of grievance and mental pain. When this is pure envy—desires for luxuries and ostentatious wealth—Epicurus would say that such people need to study the classification of desires. When financial dissatisfactions consist of more everyday elements—the desire for stability, the ability to save, the occasional modest extravagance—then practical prudence is invaluable. Griping about politics or about the excesses of the ultra-rich simply isn’t a very effective way of reducing your worries. Cutting your expenses by 30% through intelligent planning is.
Even for the comparatively wealthy, who don’t worry at all about near-term financial insecurity, efficient living can often be a valuable element in achieving a more tranquil life. If you have ever felt that retirement is farther off than you would like, or that you would prefer to work fewer hours, or that you would prefer a different field of work if only you didn’t need the money, then consider whether your lifestyle need cost as much as it does.
Most people, in short, whether rich or poor or somewhere in between, can benefit from exercising a little more practical wisdom in how they arrange their spending and saving. These questions aren’t indifferent—as Platonists, Stoics, or Skeptics might say—but have a real impact on the tranquility of your life and your freedom to enjoy the ubiquitous pleasures of existence. Maybe only a few of these ten suggestions will help you. But if you can make an improvement in any one of these domains, then you have taken one more step towards ataraxia.
I make some specific recommendations below based on my personal experience, with links where it seems helpful. I derive no financial gain from any of these recommendations except for the labelled referral link for Mint Mobile.
Mid-sized Recurring Expenses
1. Phone Service, Phones, and Internet Access
Let’s start with a few simple and straightforward expenses, discrete line-items in the family budget that are often more expensive than they need to be for no good reason.
I’m often shocked by how much people pay for their cell phone service out of mere inertia and brand name familiarity. This is pointless: the big companies are all legally required to share network access with smaller companies. I use Mint, which is on the T-Mobile network and has been just fine for me for years (technically, they have now been acquired by T-Mobile). Even their base tier has unlimited talk, text, and plenty of data, so my monthly cost is $15 (when paid in advance). If you happen to know that, say, the AT&T network is better than T-Mobile in your area, then you can use Cricket or PureTalk or some other provider on the AT&T network. And so on. (If you’d like to try Mint, they have a referral program: use this link and we’ll help each other like good Epicureans and each get some extra credit.)
Some people get sucked in to the big companies by their offering of “free” phones (along with a contract to their overpriced services). But so many people abandon perfectly fine phones these days that you can get refurbished previous-year models at quite affordable prices. I’m a fancy modern person, so I purchased my first iPhone about two years ago. It was $133 on Backmarket and is still going strong. (I also got a perfectly good Android tablet for $55 there, on which I can read philosophy pdfs just as comfortably as on a $600 iPad.)
Your options for internet service will often be more constrained by your location, but it’s still worth checking if you have more than one local option, and avoiding getting upsold to faster speeds. I type words and watch movies and have never felt the need for more than the most basic tier of internet access, which currently costs me $40 a month (with a discount for automatic payment by bank account).
2. Food
I’ve written a bit before about Epicurus’ advocacy for frugal eating (for which we have specific testimony), so I’ll keep it brief here. If you consider yourself an intelligent and philosophical person, you should be able to feed yourself more cheaply than the average unreflective individual. Based on local prices, apparently the average monthly expenditure on food and alcohol in my area is $567 per person. In my household, it’s around $300. If you need tips, see that previous article.
3. “Servants”: Restaurants, Home Maintenance, Professional Services
Most modern people would look a little askance at the suggestion that they employ servants—we’re not 19th century aristocrats here! But essentially everyone hires the assistance of part-time servants in some form or other. Maybe you could do with fewer.
One of the most ubiquitous ways in which people hire the labor of others is in restaurants, where separate individuals can be paid to cook for you, pour your drinks, relay your commands, and wash your dishes. Personally, I enjoy home-cooked meals more—the food is made with affection, the ambience is just how I like it, the wait is never tiresome, and the drive home is non-existent. So I eat out fairly rarely.
Many people hire house cleaners, lawn mowers, driveway shovelers, and car washers. Check how much you’re spending on those: is it worth it? Personally, I find intervals of physical tasks rather refreshing after a long time on the computer or doing dense reading. And if you have kids, give them chores. It’s good for them.
Beyond the most basic maintenance, many household tasks are perfectly approachable by the individual of average intelligence with the ability to consult the internet (or a dad, friend, or neighbor), yet are often timidly outsourced. You need a new headlight in your car or a new tube in your bike tire? There’s a hole in your wall that needs to be patched? You don’t know how to exercise? It’s time to file your taxes? I wouldn’t outsource any of these things. The material costs are negligible, and learning how to do things for yourself will boost your sense of secure competence and render you more fearless of misfortune, as Epicurus would say.
4. Entertainment Subscriptions
How much are you paying for your current custom mix of constantly renewed video, music, and words? That stuff can add up quickly.
First, of course, you’ll want to unsubscribe from any Stoic Substacks or other peddlers of misguided dogma. All Untroubled content is free, unless I can someday get enough readers that it seems worthwhile to monetize it. (You’re safe for now.) Other than that, read mostly books instead of ephemeral digital trivialities.
Then start going to the library. I preached the virtues of this wonderful institution in Cheap Fun: they give me movies on DVD, movies on streaming, e-books, books made of paper, free passes to parks, free passes to museums, and more.
More broadly, spend more time outside, learning, or creating than passively consuming. It’s more satisfying.
Once you have executed the above steps to the fullest extent, you may carefully add back in one or two sources of consumption-based entertainment, if truly needed. I have Spotify. I split the family plan between three separate households (they haven’t cracked down on me yet!), because Epicureans like sharing.
Financial Matters
5. Insurance
There are many forms of insurance, and a full treatment of the topic could obviously get lengthy. But there are two basic guidelines that everyone should keep in mind. First, don’t buy too much. Remember, insurance companies make money; therefore, whenever you buy insurance, you are, on average, going to lose money. Insurance should accordingly only be voluntarily purchased when the event you are insuring against would be objectively calamitous. For a prudent Epicurean who has a comfortable amount of savings, there is no real reason to be more afraid of a $10,000 expense than a $1,000 expense, so you should choose high deductibles and skip insurance on replaceable things (consumer goods, comprehensive insurance on cheap cars). This is mathematically the more logical course. If you can’t afford a $10,000 emergency expense, work on that as an urgent priority, then implement this strategy.
Second, comparison shop. I occasionally hear of people paying astronomical amounts for their car insurance, for instance. Get a few quotes. I’ve usually ended up with Geico. In my experience in recent years, I’ve paid between $400 (cheap car, no comprehensive, just me) and $1400 a year (babysitting my sister’s fancier car when she moved abroad, with comprehensive, adding a younger driver). If you pay substantially above that, wouldn’t you prefer not to?
For more, I recommend the classic Mr. Money Mustache article, “Insurance: A Tax on People Who Are Bad at Math?” Weighing advantages and disadvantages in a process of calm, quantifiable comparison is what Epicureans do, so we pay less of this “tax” than the fearful many.
6. Banking
As with cell phone service, a lot of people act like the big companies have a monopoly on the industry, and that they have no choice but to go to the downtown Bank of America or Wells Fargo or whatever, where the gracious big company will charge them a mere $25 a month to have an account while paying them 0.01% in interest on their cash. This isn’t necessary! The cost of a bank account should be $0, and you should earn at least 2% on your cash these days.
Try your local credit union (usually you can use any credit union ATM without fees, if you’re worried about convenience). If your local options don’t pay reasonable interest, consider an online cash management account. As of this writing, Fidelity and Wealthfront are both paying over 3.5% interest on their free accounts, for instance.
7. Credit Cards
Your existing cash savings can earn you 3%, or it can earn you nothing. Similarly, your existing spending can earn you around 3% back via well-chosen credit cards, or it can earn you nothing. In the simplest form, if you want zero hassle, get a card that has no annual fee and gives you 2% back on everything, like the Citi Double Cash or the Fidelity Rewards (when depositing rewards into a Fidelity investment account). If you have an expense category where you spend a relatively large amount, look for a card that offers a higher rate on that. For my family, the only category that is particularly high is groceries: I have this Aven card that gives 6% back on groceries, or if you don’t like new financial tech startups, this AAA card offers 5% back. Neither has an annual fee.
There are, of course, lots of options. The most lucrative way to play the credit card game is to regularly get new cards that offer big welcome bonuses (“earn 100,000 points when you spend $4000” and the like), redeem the points in an optimal way (which usually means airline tickets), and then cancel the cards before any fees are due for the second year. But that hassle may not be worth it for most people. Be careful, folks. Don’t sign up for things if you don’t know what you’re getting into. And of course: do not do this if it will make you spend more, or if you are paying interest on any of your purchases.
Almost everyone, however, does use credit cards. And there are no-fee cards out there that offer at least 2% cashback on everything, so I don’t see any reason to get less than that.
8. Investments
As of October 2026, cash can easily earn 2–4% with no risk. Of course, financially capable people do not merely save cash, but invest their money. There are myriad investment approaches and I am not going to get into details here, but the conventional wisdom would say that money in your savings account will ultimately just keep track with inflation (at best), while index investing in the overall stock market offers an average return in the neighborhood of 7% after inflation. Of course, stocks are more volatile and there can be years in which the return is negative, so investment decisions should be made carefully.
If you have not given any thoughts to investing strategy and would like to keep things simple, the general recommendation which I would endorse is simple low-cost index investing. Get a book like Collins’ The Simple Path to Wealth or Bogle’s Little Book of Common Sense Investing, follow their advice, and your money will grow, quite reliably in the long run. Such a strategy is easy to execute and avoids paying useless advisors to “manage” your money, while earning less than the average return of the market.
So: make sure your long-term savings are being put to work, earning money for you. If you need to figure out a strategy, do so. If you get any employer matches or tax benefits for retirement savings, take advantage of them. The specifics are too varied for me to go into here, but I would be remiss to omit this potentially very large opportunity cost from what is otherwise an article about more typical expenses.
Two Big Ones
9. Transportation
Lastly, I want to mention two particularly large items on the balance sheets of many families: transportation and housing. These expenses are of course not easy to shift quickly, but if you are under 80 years old or so, you will probably have to make some decisions related to them at some point. You want them to be good ones.
For transportation, the two most valuable things you can do are to avoid a big car commute and to avoid buying an unnecessarily fancy car, lured by the marketing of novel features or social prestige. Most people never calculate the cost of their driving. A minority will make some estimates of the most obvious costs, such as gas or tolls. Really, a full estimate would also account for maintenance and depreciation of your car (the IRS uses .76 cents/mile, including gas) and the value of your own time. If you drive a fancy car, command a personally high hourly wage, or drive more than average, you should incorporate all those facts into your estimates.
Just on the car side and ignoring the value of your time (which you shouldn’t do), the average American drives around 14,000 miles a year, which costs $10,640 per year based on the IRS estimate, which equates to about $153,000 over a decade if you add in the opportunity cost of not having that money invested and earning 7% or so in a standard stock index fund.
This is the kind of quantification exercise which you rarely encounter in philosophical writings, but which I think Epicurus would endorse as part of that symmetrisis kai sympheronton kai asymphoron, that comparison of advantages and disadvantages. It’s not a moral or metaphysical dilemma, but it makes a big difference to the cost and quality of your life if you can engineer your life to require less driving.
I’ve moved several times in the last decade: I started out with an hour-long car commute, then reduced it to a ten-minute drive, then to a fifteen-minute bike ride with busy streets and a big hill, then to a ten-minute bike ride on a flat path. I consider this a good example of phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, in action: continually look to make your life better by calmly comparing your options and choosing the course with more pleasure and less pain.
10. Housing
Typically the biggest expense of all, and often the hardest to modify, is housing. I live in California, so naturally I would like it if housing were cheaper: the state’s median home value is currently around $760,000. But as an Epicurean, I focus on what is under my individual control. In the big picture, there’s a lot of variation in how much people pay for housing, with many different relevant factors depending on your own circumstances.
The general message is what it has been throughout this piece: make your comparisons carefully. Measure the pros and cons of your choices as comprehensively as you reasonably can. For instance, you may think you’re getting a lower housing cost by living farther from your work, but make sure to fully account for the cost of your commute, as described in the previous entry. Think carefully about how much benefit you will derive from a prospective increase in home size or additional amenity. Compare the costs of renting and homeownership—in certain circles of the United States, the passion for owning a home (by which we usually mean “paying a mortgage”) often approaches a religious zealotry that doesn’t even admit the relevance of math. Math is always relevant.
In closing, I’d like to reiterate the goal of all this. A lot of “money saving tips” leave the underlying goal up to the reader. For many people, the implicit benefit of saving money on a given service is that the money can then be spent on something else. For Epicureans, however, the benefit of living more frugally is a little different: we are not trying to skillfully maximize our consumer consumption, but to maximize our security (as in PD 6, 7, and 14). Recall the Letter to Menoeceus:
Accustom yourself, then, to a plain rather than an extravagant way of life: this is integral to health, makes a man resolute before the necessary duties of life, enables us to better enjoy occasional luxuries, and renders us fearless of misfortune. (LM 131)
To be “fearless of misfortune”—that is our goal. If you feel you need a six-figure income “just to get by,” then life will indeed seem more precarious and challenging than if you can get by perfectly well with half the expenditure. Over time, the benefits of always living below your means compound: productively invested savings accumulate and various forms of potential financial distress drop out of sight, one after another. Frugality becomes effortlessly habitual, or even a pleasant pastime in certain domains—one more well-practiced skill to deploy, like riding a bike or cooking your favorite food. As worries diminish, your daily life is increasingly occupied by the innumerable pleasures of existence, which are never hard to find. To choose the less painful path is to choose the path of pleasure.