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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Learning to be Frugal for the Already Frugal Family

Frugality: prudence in avoiding waste.

I feel like every time I'm trying to think of a post to write I collide with one of my many character flaws. The purpose of this blog is not to be a confessional, I promise you.
     I had kind of a freak out this past week. I won't go into the details, but I can say that I freaked out about money. After spending a day on the couch, languishing and licking my wounds, I realized that the only way to combat this gnawing feeling of increasing fear for the future was to trust the Lord and get proactive about cutting costs wherever I could.

Do you know that when you Google "how to be frugal," or "how to spend less money" the only suggestions that come up are for people who make $50,000 a year, and stop by Starbucks on their way to work every morning? What about all of us truly poor people?
After a very fruitless internet searching session, I decided to head to the library. Same story there. I found about ten books, Being Frugal for Idiots, The Dummies Guide to Being Frugal, Cheap Talks with the Frugal Friends, etc, but none of them gave suggestions for people who are already frugal and who want to cut costs even more. What if I don't have a $3 latte that I can cut out of my budget every day and put it into my vacation fund? What if I already shop at Aldi, make meal-plans, buy generic shampoo, and buy big Tins-O-Coffee but still need to cut costs even further?
I haven't found anything to help people like me. This gave me an idea...
I will devote this blog to the very subject. Now, I'm not sure exactly what that will look like; I am not an expert on saving money, nor do I have any wisdom in the subject...yet. But I want to try to learn how to be frugal with an already frugal budget, and I will share my successes and failures with you, my devoted audience, along the way.
The first step in my quest for frugality was to cancel our Netflix account. This was the one area we'd allowed ourselves to be frivolous with our money. Frivolous, meaning we spent fifteen dollars a month to be able to watch movies whenever we wanted. We decided, however, just this weekend, that Netflix was, in our life, the opposite of practicing prudence in avoiding waste even in the figurative sense of the definition. So, that's $17/month we can save put towards another bill, and time we can spend together.
There will be more to come in the How-to-be-frugal-when-you're-already-frugal quest.




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