I don’t think that frugal was a word in my vocabulary until some time in 2007.
Before Pippa was born, Jodi and I both worked for a couple of years, and we had built up some small savings, simply because we were not spending money as fast as we were earning it (in other words, saving was not at all intentional). When Jodi left her job in order to have Pippa, things instantly became much tighter. Our income halved and we made few changes to accommodate that. I didn’t know what sort of things I could do. So we gradually depleted our savings.
I think that I calculated that we would run out of money by September 2006 or so. And we didn’t know what we could do. We knew that we didn’t want Jodi to go back to work, but we knew that we weren’t surviving on my income alone. We were planning on moving to America, however, and we knew that by selling our flat we would make some money, and give us a nice lump sum.
So in August 2006, we moved from Scotland (not just for financial reasons). Our flat in Scotland sold shortly after that and we got the expected little windfall from that. The majority of that money became the down-payment on our current house. We were left with some cash-in-hand however, which we frittered away. I just had the money sitting in our no-interest-paying current account (oh, if I knew then what I know now) and each month our account balance dropped, until finally, in the summer of 2007, we hit zero. We couldn’t afford an essential car repair payment. That was a wake-up call for us. I would now say that “Money that comes easily disappears quickly”.
So, like the prodigal son, we quickly squandered all of our money. I was going to send Jodi to work on a local pig farm (maybe it was just the local grocery store, I don’t remember), but she wasn’t too keen on it. Instead we started selling stuff on eBay, which supplemented our income a little. That was the beginning of our financial turn-around.
At some point around this time I discovered PF blogs (Personal Finance blogs). It was my first introduction to blogs, and I found them by mistake. I was looking to confirm my suspicions about a “pink slip”, and came across a blog post about what to do after getting one. I started reading other pages on that blog and clicked on the RSS feed icon and started my feed collection (now at over 30 blogs). Anyway, the original blog was a PF blog and opened my eyes to the world of personal finance, and thence frugality. Not all PF blogs are frugal minded, by the way. There are other ways of looking after one’s money carefully. Frugality is just one tool to use.
Frugality is a method of making the pennies last longer.
And that really sums it up. If the pennies last longer, then one has more options of how to spend them, or, even better, of saving them up for the future. To me, frugal decisions tend to be those which save small amounts of money, or have a larger initial outlay, but then are cheaper in the long run. Examples might be cloth napkins over paper towels, or CFL light-bulbs instead of traditional filament bulbs. They all add up over time. If I save just a dollar every time I do something, but repeat that thing every day, at the end of a year I will have an extra $365 to spend or save which I would not have had otherwise.
How frugal are we in our household? I suppose most people looking in would say that we are very frugal. But we are by no means extreme. I don’t wash baggies (but I do re-use them, dirty). We don’t make our own laundry detergent (although it might not be far off). Ok, I guess we are pretty extreme.
I think that we are just trying to be sensible with our spending and save pennies whenever possible. Frugality has been a useful factor in turning our finances around, but I think that other factors have contributed more. Such as selling on eBay, refinancing our mortgage, getting rid of our cell phones and cable tv (I guess these were frugal). Speaking of which, this very afternoon I called our internet provider and asked for a discount. He gave us $20 off for the next six months, just for asking. That’s $120 for a ten-minute phone call. That’s $720 per hour. Not a bad hourly rate. If only I could keep it up for more than ten minutes.
Frugality is really a means to an end. It started off for us as an essential – how are we going to make ends meet? But then, as we saw the results and saw our savings start to grow and things become *more* comfortable, we became more and more frugal. Now it has become a kind of game (to me at least). I am amazed at how, on a flat salary, we are saving more and giving away more now, two years and two kids later than we were when we moved here. And it does seem as though every month our financial situation improves. That has never been the case before and I am very grateful to God for His faithfulness and for introducing us to frugality and providing ways for us to cut back on our expenses.
My biggest problem with frugality and personal finances is getting carried away. I forget the purpose of our money – it isn’t for us to grow wealthy with, but for us to use wisely and to be generous with. It isn’t worth doing some things to save a few cents. And the money we have been given is for us to share and use for the glory of God.
You can read Jodi’s thoughts on frugality on her blog, Jodilightful.