Secondhand and surplus-food habits, quantified

Two habits I've kept for a while without ever adding up: buying secondhand clothes on Vinted, and buying surplus food at a discount through Too Good To Go. Both get mentioned constantly in FI and frugality writing as good defaults. Neither of mine had ever been through an actual total before now.

Vinted

Across about a year and a half of orders: 58 completed purchases, 212 individual items, from 63 different sellers, for a combined total a little under £900. That works out at roughly £4 per item and £15 per order — genuinely cheap, and spread thin enough across sellers that it's obviously a habit rather than a relationship with any one shop. A handful of orders (9, out of 67 attempted) were cancelled by the seller for not shipping in time, which is the one bit of marketplace friction that doesn't show up in any of the totals here.

One month breaks the pattern completely. A typical month sits somewhere between £10 and £70. One single month accounts for more than half of the entire year and a half's total on its own. That month lines up, suspiciously exactly, with the sustained spending step-change I wrote about in the "full year" post — which is a more interesting coincidence than a coincidence, and probably the same story told from a different account.

Too Good To Go

A smaller number, and a stranger pattern: 51 orders, averaging a little over £4 each, for a total a shade over £200. But it isn't spread evenly — a cluster of orders through one summer, then nothing at all for about six months, then a steady handful of orders every month since. I'd guess the gap lines up with the same busy, expensive stretch that shows up in both the other posts — when everything else in life demands more attention, the small good habits are usually the first thing to lapse, not the last, which is the opposite of how I'd have guessed it would go.

What the totals actually say

Combined, these two habits cost under £1,100 across the periods I have data for — not a meaningful lever on a savings rate, in exactly the same way the vending machine wasn't. What they actually do is come in cheaper than the equivalent new-and-fresh alternative by default, without requiring any ongoing willpower once the apps are installed. That's the Playing with FIRE argument in practice: frugality that survives because it's structural, not because you're gritting your teeth every time you buy a t-shirt or order dinner.

The more useful finding wasn't the total. It was noticing that both habits went quiet during exactly the same months — a small, independent confirmation that when one part of a plan comes under pressure, the parts that depend on spare attention are the ones that go first.

Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any. Figures are rounded from my own account exports; specific sellers, items, and usernames have deliberately been left out.