Hubby, Little Lady and I have just come back from a week away in a caravan. During this much needed family holiday, Hubby and I finally had the chance to discuss our financial situation. Hubby has a good job, and I am lucky to be able to stay at home with LL while she is young. We recently refinanced and as a result, have paid off the car and credit card and are now debt free (besides the mortgage of course!). However, this doesn’t mean that it’s all smooth sailing. Over the past few months in particular, I have noticed our grocery bill going up and up. Same goes for the electricity and water bills, and don’t even get me started on how much it costs to clothe the three of us! Also, we don’t intend for Little Lady to be an only child, so how much more expensive is life going to become when we add another bub into the mix? All this has been weighing on my mind.
Before we went away, anticipating some free time where I might actually get to read something, I purchased the October issue of The Australian Womens Weekly. In this months issue (and I urge you all to buy a copy and have a read), was an article on fugal living. The article talks about the difference between being “cheap” and being “frugal”.
“Being frugal is not the same as being cheap. The frugality movement, as it has been dubbed, has a deeper purpose than just suggesting ways to save money. It offers a new –or rather recycled- philosophy for living, which is to spend less, live more, reduce your possessions and increase your self-sufficiency…A cheap person doesn’t consider the full ramifications of his consumption and will consume things just because the price tag is low. A frugal person will consider whether he needs the item, rather than just purchasing it because it’s cheap. So, a good example is that if you eat at McDonalds, that’s cheap; if you make a home-cooked meal for your family and eat the leftovers the next day, that’s frugal”.*
After reading Hubby the article, we got into a discussion about our “unnecessary spending” and how we could possibly start reducing the amount of money that seems to “disappear” every week. It seems that all we ever want to do is make our money stretch further. So, this idea of living frugally, rather than cheaply, intrigued us.
Now, I never have considered us to be extravagant people. We live sensibly, within our means, and we don’t squander our money. We don’t buy designer clothes (Target, Kmart and BigW are our go-to stores!), drive a fancy car, take flashy holidays, own fancy furniture or participate in expensive hobbies. Hubby takes his lunch to work every day, I do a lot of baking, we rarely go out and we have takeaway on average, once a fortnight. But, as we thought more about it we realised that we were spending a lot of our money unnecessarily.
I started looking at the amount of money we were spending on things like snack foods, items for Hubby’s lunchbox and household cleaning products. I spent $200 at Target just buying Little Lady clothes for this Summer, and I know it’s still not going to be enough. Even things like nappies and baby wipes. I was amazed to see how much of my weekly grocery budget was going on items like these. But hey, what can you do? They’re all essential items right? Well yes, they are. But, as I am now discovering, with a little patience and creativity it’s not difficult to start saving money, even on these so called “essentials”.
And so, we come back to the idea of living frugally or living cheaply. For all of our life post children, so far,I believe Hubby and I have been living cheaply. We know we can’t squander our money, but we haven’t been realistically looking at ways to stretch it. The solution? An experiment. Six months of living frugally.
For the next six months Hubby and I have come up with ways to make our money stretch. No more snacky pre packaged “convenient” foods, no more expensive household cleaning products that are full of chemicals that aggravate both mine and LL’s extremely sensitive skin, no more store bought baked goods that are full of preservatives, and no more rip off clothes that stretch out of shape, shrink and are often bin worthy after one season. We are going to bake, stew, mix, preserve and sew our way to a healthier and wealthier lifestyle! Please forgive the corny wording, I’m actually excited by this!
This will be my record. All our observations, experiments, failures and triumphs will be recorded here, and in March 2012 we will see the effect that living frugally has had on our budget, as well as our health and well being!
It all starts tomorrow…
*Australian Womens Weekly, October 2011 Issue, page 40 “Why we crave the Simple Life” by Ingrid Pyne.
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