4 Money-Saving Lessons From Summer Camping You Can Use All Year

I've had the pleasure of spending most of the last two weeks camping in rural Wisconsin. I've had the chance to visit beautiful state parks, rustic lakeshores and many other locations around this great northern state.

Along the way, the camping experience revealed many life and money lessons that I can use the rest of the year. Here are four things camping taught me that can have a profound impact on finances and life.

You usually have to give up something to save money, but you get to choose what you give up. This seems like common sense, of course.

The catch here is that you don't have to give up the things you really care about when you're giving something up to save money. Our minds tend to always snap toward the features that we care the most about, and the thought of giving up those features seems painful, but there are many routes to saving money and those routes often involve sacrificing very unimportant things.

When my family is camping, we make most of our meals either at a picnic table or around a campfire, so we don't need electricity at the campsite. Why pay extra for something we're barely going to use? For the rare occasion when we need electricity -- to charge a device, for example -- there are other options available, such as a solar charger or a USB port in a car when driving.

When you choose the less expensive route, you almost always end up with unexpected and memorable experiences. I've found, time and time again, that the best unexpected surprises in life haven't come from spending hundreds of dollars to be pampered at some perfectly engineered business. Instead, I've found it in surprising moments doing something that was a little less expensive and a little less full service than other options.

Choosing a less expensive campsite in a state park rather than a full-featured campground provided us with some amazing views directly from our campsite. We also had immediate access to several hiking trails and found blueberries close to our campsite.

This simple phenomenon proves true in many areas of life. You can't find a hidden treasure if you start your shopping at the expensive store, after all.

When you make it yourself, it has a special quality that can't be captured by things you merely buy. A meal that you assembled yourself and prepared over a campfire somehow tastes better than a prepackaged meal or a meal from a restaurant. Sure, it requires some additional effort, but it's also loaded with the ingredients and spices that you chose.

We often make "campfire meals" on camping trips, which are simply packets of aluminum foil filled with various vegetables, meats and other ingredients. Everyone brings an ingredient or two to the table, and each person chooses what to include in his or her meal. Once it's assembled, the packet is tossed right on the campfire.

By doing this, each person chooses exactly what they want to eat. It takes longer, but by doing it this way, everyone has freedom of choice over their meal and the experience of assembling it themselves, which somehow always makes the meal taste fantastic.

Again, this works in many areas of life. Whenever you take control of something and do it yourself, it feels good to complete it.

Spending less on something usually leaves you feeling better about it later. Last year, at the end of a rather expensive vacation, my wife and I both found ourselves feeling pretty bad about the bills that rolled in. We faced some stiff expenses from that trip and realizing how much money it cost us -- and what opportunities were lost because of those expenses -- was painful.

This year, our vacation was much less expensive. When we returned home, we didn't have that "after-purchase guilt" over spending too much. Instead, we just felt good about the whole trip and remembered the great experiences without lamenting the expenses.

Whenever you have an opportunity to spend less on something that you value without sacrificing the qualities that matter to you, it's almost always a victory. It feels good, because you're not only having a great experience, you're also allowing yourself to have more opportunities in the future.

Even something as simple as a family camping trip can teach you a lot of useful and valuable life lessons. In the end, it's all about making smart choices and enjoying the unexpected rewards that life sometimes gives you if you open yourself to those opportunities.

Trent Hamm is the founder of the personal finance website TheSimpleDollar.com, which provides consumers with resources and tools to make informed financial decisions.