Use frugality to fund your goals

For all my frugality, I still have an Achilles’ heel, a small but significant point of budget vulnerability. Ironically, thrift stores, those bastions of economy, sometimes threaten to sabotage my well-laid plans.
The notion of a beautiful lamp, just waiting to be unearthed, a vintage cashmere cardigan lurking in between polyester blouses, the possibility of finding retro tumblers for our 1978 pop-up camper literally quickens my pulse when I walk in my favorite shops. But when my husband recently suggested I create a thrift store fund, I realized it’s time to rethink those frequent forays.
His suggestion reminds me that frugality isn’t an end, but a means. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much money I save on a pair of thrifted designer shoes, if buying them is keeping me from reaching my goals. I can string together as many frugal practices as I can conjure up, but this misses the point of living with thrift.
Frugality for frugality’s sake can make you feel like Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology who was forced to spend eternity pushing a giant boulder to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back down again. If sticking to a budget (or the very idea of starting one) feels like drudgery, or even a punishment, it’s time to see your budget through new eyes.
Using frugal practices as a way to get what you want is empowering, even exhilarating. It’s packing your lunch, not as a way of denying yourself the pleasure of a meal out with friends or coworkers, but as a means to use the money you would have otherwise spent to take your dream cruise to Alaska. It’s kicking the habit of buying new books in favor of borrowing titles from the library so you can buy a new sewing machine or jigsaw.
Without something to motivate you, your budget can become a giant stone in your life. One way to nudge that stone from its place is to write down five things that you love. Don’t censor yourself while you’re making your list—just write.
Maybe travel or music makes you feel fully alive. Perhaps it’s the notion of living by the water someday or opening a business that excites you. Photography, crafting something with your hands, horses, writing your memoir, finally getting all of your family together, being debt free—whatever stirs within you—write it on your list.
Next, choose something from your list and begin thinking about ways you could indulge this passion. If it’s photography, could you use your favorite photograph to make a canvas print for your dining room? Or what about getting a new camera or taking a photography class to sharpen your skills?
When you settle on a way to tap into your passion, estimate how much it will cost. Say you want to make a 20-by-20 inch print of the starfish you snapped at the beach, which you find will cost around $100. Now ask yourself how you can adjust your budget to save the money you’ll need.
You can use coupons when you shop for groceries and stash the money you save. You can calculate what you spend on eating out each month, cut that amount in half, and squirrel away the savings. Funnel all your change into a jar, or be more adventurous, and color your own hair instead of going to the salon.
Whatever cost-saving measure you take, be diligent to use the money to help you reach your goals. The lesson for me in all of this is to be frugal, but always with purpose.

Determination, imagination essential for sticking to a budget

My plan to dramatically scale back my family’s food budget is in full swing. Last week, I withdrew $200 in cash from our bank account--$50 for eating out that I tucked into an envelope for later, and $150 to buy groceries for the next two weeks.
With cash in my wallet, I headed into the grocery store with four children, a calculator, and – unknown to me – a smuggled toy hammer. The scene played out like this: while I tried to concentrate on shopping, my 4-year-old used said toy hammer to pound on cereal boxes and ripe cantaloupe. Meanwhile, my 2-year-old attempted to hoist a $6 watermelon and topple pyramids of apples.
After I confiscated the hammer and contained the hoister of watermelons, I pulled out my tiny pocket calculator, so worn that half of the numbers and symbols were missing. The baby on my hip batted the calculator from my hand several times. I had to let my 5-year-old steer the cart so I could keep a running total of everything I was buying.
At the end of a stressful hour in the store, I rolled up to the register with $147.30 worth of groceries in my cart. Overwhelmed with relief to have stayed within my budget and to be leaving, I reached for my debit card and paid for my groceries. I was loading my car when I realized I’d forgotten to use the cash I pulled from my account. Nobody said this budget-conscious shopping was going to be easy or go smoothly on the first try.
When I got home, I finalized my menu and thought about lessons I’d learned already. First, I realized that if we are to stick to a new grocery plan, I’m going to have to retrain my brain and concentrate on what I’m doing. This means leaving the kids at home and making a more comprehensive list.
I’ve always paid attention to sales and compared price per ounce, but I now need to ratchet up my efforts. I weighed grapes and apples (which I’ve admittedly never done before) and thought about every item I picked up. I didn’t just toss our old standbys into the cart, but thought about more cost-effective ways to eat the foods we enjoy. Instead of pudding cups, for example, I bought prepackaged cook-and-serve pudding at a fraction of the cost. I plan to refine this even further and make homemade cooked pudding with the recipe my mother used every week when I was a child.
Second, I acknowledge I’ll face a few budget hiccups. I had to plan a meal for a group of 11 women, and for a family camping trip. These situations were both out of the ordinary, but still required me to stay within the limit I had set. A budget won’t help me if I break it every time something unusual comes up.
So, I got creative with my menus. For the camping trip, several families worked cooperatively to make meals. I agreed to make breakfast, which allowed me to use items I already had in my pantry and freezer to make two pans of pull-apart caramel rolls. They were a big hit with the crowd and kept my budget intact.
For dinner with my friends, I prepared an elegant meal of homemade miniature quiches, a garden salad with greens from my own patch, rhubarb soda, and apple crisp . I was able to pull it off by imaginatively using resources I had available to me – and that will be the key to living well on a budget.

Lower food bills can move us closer to debt-free lifestyle

I wish I could say that after all these years of writing about money, I’ve reached some sort of financial nirvana, a place where our budget effortlessly hums along. In truth, we hit budget bumps and have starts and stops every month like everyone else. Nevertheless, even if it were possible to find perfection, that isn’t the point of a budget.

A budget isn’t a static template that we lay over our lives; it’s a spending guide that flexes with our family. For us, one of the most exciting things about a budget is that it constantly offers us opportunities to see our finances with fresh eyes. When we see where we’re spending, we can shift our priorities.

It turns out that we’re getting ready for a major shift in our family budget. When we recently calculated our total monthly food expenses, we faced a sobering truth. In June, we spent over a $1,000 on food for our family of six, and in the five months prior to that, we averaged over $800 on groceries and eating out. We know we can do better. We want to do better.

We’ve challenged ourselves to cut our food budget in half, not as a way to be stingy, but because we want to stretch our money. We’re looking for creative ways to get the things we want and need with the money we have. Ultimately, our goal is to be entirely debt free, so we plan to take half of what we save on food costs and apply it to the principle balance on our mortgage. We’ll devote the other half to projects for our family. We want some fun things, including a family trip and a playhouse for our children. Some practical items, such as a new vacuum and a woodstove, also are on our list.

Cutting our food budget in half may sound like a daunting task. How will this even be possible in a family of growing children who are voracious eaters? We’ll start with what we spend on eating out, which averages over $200 a month. By packing snacks and lunches instead of heading for the nearest fast food restaurant, we’ll whittle down what we spend on eating out to $100, which we plan to take out in cash and keep in an envelope. When the cash is gone, there’s no more eating out that month.

We’ll use the same all-cash approach with grocery shopping, because I know how easy it is to spend more than I’ve planned. Case in point, when I stopped at the grocery store with four items on my list for a camping trip, I walked out with 10 and spent three times as much as I had planned. With cash, that won’t happen.

We’ll also have to carve out more time for food preparation and change the way we do some of our shopping. This means rethinking items we mindlessly put in our cart, including pudding cups and granola bars. Juice won’t be a morning mainstay, but will become an occasional treat. Even pantry staples like egg noodles (Here is the Cowgirl's Country Life blog where she has a great recipe for Chicken and (Egg) Noodles) that seem inexpensive will be foods I buy the ingredients for and prepare at home - for a fraction of the grocery store price. We’ll keep trying different strategies until we find budget-stretching ideas that truly work for us.

I’ll be sharing my journey to reduce my food bill with you in future posts. And I encourage you to share your best cost-cutting ideas with me. E-mail me at cdenman@acce-online.com or leave comments below. Adventures in frugal living are more fun when we experience them together.

Children never too young to learn value of frugality

Sometimes, living a frugal lifestyle means my husband and I go against the grain of modern society and its demands to have the shiniest, biggest and best of everything. We put value on making the most of our money and living within our means. We like simple pleasures that are richly rewarding but don’t break our budget. We live frugally, not as an end unto itself, but because our frugality allows us to have a life we desire. Frugality isn’t about deprivation (or about washing out plastic sandwich bags or reusing sheets of tinfoil). It’s about finding new, less expensive ways to get the things we need and afford more of the things we enjoy. It is a creative challenge.

We work hard to “walk the talk” of frugality with our children. We are teaching them to spend money wisely and carefully consider what they want. As our children learn thriftiness, they share the satisfaction and rewards of this kind of lifestyle. We have to consistently teach them how to live this way, so we’re dedicated to intentionally using our resources well.

For example, we have a 5-year-old daughter who desperately wants a scooter. I’ve seen them in retail stores for $30 to $50, but I’ve also seen them at rummage sales on occasion for half as much. We’ve told her that we will spend up to $20 on a scooter, so this means that she can contribute some of her own money, wait for a retail sale, or hold off buying a scooter until we stumble upon a secondhand one. Since we’ve set a budget, we don’t have to say “no” to the scooter when she asks. Instead, we can remind her to keep an eye out for what she wants at a price we can afford.

These types of conversations, when we discuss what we can and cannot afford, are common in our home. To us, it’s important to demonstrate to our children that we have a limited amount of money and that we need to make wise choices about how we spend it.

It’s also important to us that our children see how planning ahead can be a way to enjoy life and still keep a budget intact. Throughout the year, we pick up inexpensive gifts that we tuck away in our birthday box. Right now, we have cupcake kits, rolls of stickers, a floor puzzle, books, and sundry other items in our box. When one of our children receives an invitation to a birthday party, we can avoid an extra trip to the store and a last-minute scramble to buy a gift. We can choose a present from the box instead. And, by stocking up on gift wrap when it’s on sale, we also have paper and ribbons ready. Planning and buying ahead pays off for us with stress-free solutions when birthday parties roll around.

We’ve also discovered that planning fun activities close to home stretches our money and gives us many opportunities to spend family time together. In fact, we’ve found that the more often we’re away from home, the more we tend to spend. So we try to plan activities nearby that cost little or no money and that draw upon a child’s natural affinity for simple pleasures. We take picnics, blow bubbles, wade in the creek, go for walks, fly kites, and run through the sprinkler.

As they grow, we know our children’s likes and interests will change. We know they may want and need things more costly than a $20 scooter – but they don’t ever have to outgrow loving affordable, uncomplicated things.

Simple steps toward budgeting can empower you

When I was recently introduced to a friend’s husband, the first words out of his mouth were, “You’re that woman who writes about budgets all the time, right?”“I’ve never been good at that kind of stuff,” he volunteered. Then, as if I might ask him to get out his checkbook register for an impromptu budgeting session, he quickly left.I suppose it’s possible that I might have had spinach in my teeth, but I think talking about budgets made him uncomfortable. That brief exchange reflects two pervasive (and unfortunate) myths about budgeting: 1) Everyone just innately knows how to budget ; and 2) If you aren’t using a budget, you should feel guilty.Rest assured there is no such thing as a “budgeting gene” that skipped you. You don’t have to use complicated forms or be a math whiz to use a budget successfully. What’s more, the last thing a budget should do is create guilt. At its best, a budget is the single most powerful financial tool you have.If you’ve never used a budget, or you’ve given up on using a budget because it has never seemed to work for you, you may not know where to start. If the idea of throwing yourself wholeheartedly into the budgeting process seems overwhelming, you may want to try the baby-step approach.This type of budgeting lets you zero in on a single household expense. Start by reviewing your checkbook register, credit card receipts, or online accounts and calculate your total monthly spending in a specific area. When you’ve got the total amount in front you, you immediately become empowered to decide if you’re happy with your spending. If you aren’t, you can decide how much you want to cut back in that one area.But the purpose of budgeting isn’t simply to cut back. The real power is in reallocating your funds. A budget allows you to take money you’re saving in one area and spend it on things that can make your life better. You might take the extra money and build an emergency fund, pay off a debt, start a vacation fund, or put it towards another financial goal.Even if you already have a working budget, you can use this method to think critically about where your money is going. For example, my husband and I decided to look at what we spent on food last month. We spent $659 on groceries and a whopping (and shocking) $302.27 on eating out. These numbers were skewed because of some unusual family circumstances, so we took a three-month average, which put our total monthly food expenditure between $805.09 and $594.82 for groceries and $211.27 on eating out.Even though our monthly food costs fall within the average levels reported by the USDA (approximately $810 a month for a family of our size), my husband and I agreed we want to spend less on food so we can save for a woodstove. We estimate it will cost about $5,000 for the stove and installation. We’ve already saved roughly half of this, so we need to save an additional $2,500. If we spent half as much on eating out, we could save $105 a month, or $1,260 over the next 12 months.Additionally, if we adjust how we spend our food dollars at the grocery store (making our own baby food instead of buying jarred brands, cutting out prepackaged foods), we can cut our grocery bill by a $110 each month. Such carefully planned cutbacks could empower us to buy a woodstove in less than a year.