This is a guest post from my friend Stacy of LayeredSoul.com
In this day and age I believe we are all too familiar with popular diets and weight loss fads. Recently there has been buzz about not following diets, but making life long weight loss choices. The goal is not losing weight fast for a short term but losing the weight and keeping it off.
The same is true about frugal living. We can follow strict and crazy ways to save money for a short time but then a spending spree puts us right back in debt. Or we can make life style choices that, over time, help to keep the budget in balance.
I have been cheap, penny pinching, and budgeting before it was popular and cool. I have been gathering and trying out crazy ways to save money since the late 1990’s. In 2011 my husband and myself paid off our house and achieved debt free living, but before you think I have the mansion on the hill, we did it while earning $35,000 or less, raising 4 kids and living in a house that is 940 square feet.
Why am I comparing diets to frugal living? Because when we research ways to save money we can find “diet” ways or “lifestyle” ways. Since dieting and budgeting are about cutting back and living within a certain level of restriction, a ton of emotions can result in attempting to change. It’s not always healthy to live on restricted diets; the same is true in living on budget. You will need to allow the budget to have a few dollars to blow. The flip side, you may need to cut back in some of your favorite areas of spending.
Three things I want you to consider on your journey to debt free living:
1) How is your attitude? Do you present your new money saving idea with gusto and excitement? Hey kids, do you know if we hang our clothes on the line we can save a $1 a load. If we did that every week we could save $40 bucks on our electric bill. What could we do with an extra $40 bucks? Let’s brainstorm some ideas. OR Do you present your new money saving idea with guilt and sadness? I am sorry kids that we don’t have money like the Jones family. It stinks to have to hang our clothes on the line but there is no other way I am going to be able to afford anything. I just wish we had more money.
2) Living on a budget looks different for each family. One of the reasons my grocery budget is not rock bottom, I hate canned vegetables. I am willing to spend the extra money for frozen. Which means I am going to cut something else out to have the money to buy frozen vegetables. When I go on field trips we always pack lunches. I have some friends that hate packed lunches and they budget money to eat out. Even buying homeschool curriculum looks different. I spend money on an all-inclusive curriculum. It saves me time that I can spend earning money in other areas. It’s a balancing act spending time and money. What may seem like a “diet” way of saving money may be ok as a “lifestyle” way of saving for another.
3) It’s an emotional journey. You know the feeling standing on the scale and realizing you just gained 10 pounds. It going to feel the same when you have worked hard to build an emergency fund and in 5 minutes an accident happens that wipes the fund to zero. Don’t give up when the check balance is low! Try some new money saving approaches, revisit some old ones, or simple keep working the plan that built up the first emergency fund.
Stacey Lane is a wife, mother, teacher, jill-of-all-trades, and a member of the Bright Ideas Press team. Her many gifts include visual thinking, bringing order out of chaos, thinking outside the box, and taking charge (when needed). When she’s not developing curriculum or contributing to her blog at Layered Soul she homeschools her own four children. She is notoriously, amazingly frugal and has shouted, “I’m Debt Free” on the Dave Ramsey show!
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Thanks for the post. I really enjoyed reading it. I am recent convert to being a penny pincher and it has really changed the way I looked at things, but I have found that is really hasn’t decreased our quality of life. In many ways, it has made it better. Look forward to reading your blog.