Thrift Remains One of The Most Important Yet Undervalued Virtues in Modern Society By Jim McFie, a fellow of ICPAK At the first international conference, on 13 and 14 May 2026, of the Department of Accountancy in the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State, Nigeria, Julius Odida and Professor Rogers Matama presented a study entitled “Frugal behaviour as a driver of financial well-being from national Sacco members in Uganda”. The event was a Conference on “Taxation and Accounting in a Digitalised Economy: Advancing Fiscal Sustainability and Inclusive Development through Contemporary Reforms in Nigeria”. Professor Rogers Matama works at Makerere University Business School (MUBS) in Kampala. He serves as an Associate Professor and the Head of the Department of Accounting. Their presentation was heavily AI-assisted, with many pictures that made it difficult to summarise the findings of their study. But although frugality may be very pertinent in the circumstances in which we live today, it is not a new topic of study. A meta-analysis in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews covering indexed empirical papers identified a core body of between sixty and seventy primary studies specifically dedicated to personal frugal lifestyles and anti-consumption since 1985. There are several hundred articles within MDPI’s Sustainability journal that directly focus on or heavily incorporate the concept of frugality. MDPI is the acronym for the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, an academic publisher based in Basel, Switzerland, that specialises in open-access peer-reviewed articles. These articles addressing frugality in the MDPI Sustainability Journal generally fall into three distinct sub-categories: (1) Frugal Innovation: A massive cluster of papers deals with “frugal innovation”—the process of creating sophisticated technological or business solutions while drastically minimising the use of scarce resources. (2) Frugal Consumer Behaviour: Many highly cited articles analyse frugality as a psychological trait or lifestyle choice. Researchers examine how the personal rejection of