Budgeting is perhaps one of the few things I can actually remember paying attention to in my high school economics class. If there was one thing I enjoyed in class back then, it was the fact that my economics teacher always seemed to have a real life story for every topic we were discussing.
Maintaining quality was one of the things that stuck out for me. It seems for everywhere you look most of the things tagged expensive are usually seen as of quality (and in most cases this is true) while those that are less expensive might be believed to be of inferior quality. But because we can't always have everything we want, then it has to fit into the budget, in this way I feel we've all been minimalists at various points without even realizing what the term meant.
Apart from it's advantage in terms of finding better functionality for different problems. One of the first questions that popped into my head when I first came across the term was financially related. It was on how to maintain quality while still minimizing cost within the limits of a budget. It can be quite difficult, but I love it when I find a good example of a situation like that.
A few street roads (about five of them) in my area had been marked for construction for awhile and eventually work began about a month and half ago. I had to travel, so I was gone for awhile but I was surprised to return and still find the road under construction.
The slow pace of work was confusing at first, but fortunately over the last weekend I was able to find someone who knew about the project. From his explanation, I understood that they had different schedules for each area and it had to fit into the budget given.
Labor and machinery had to be moved from one area to another, so the focus wasn't only on one road and then the next.
They did this because they were trying to minimize cost of both manpower as well as machinery. Making provision for machinery for other areas simultaneously would increase cost, while also relying on inferior machines to cover that cost would mean a substandard quality to the roads.
By renting only what was needed at the moment and moving machinery from one section to another, they were able to minimize cost whilst maintaining quality and keeping within their budget range. This was minimalism on a much bigger scale than I was used to and it reinforced my initial belief that whether you understand minimalism or not, everyone practices minimalism in one form or the other.
How do you minimalize without compromising quality?
This is my submission for the #kiss prompt.
Images used above are mine.
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