After a month of moaning about how we should be able to afford certain activities that our beyond our means, I knew that I needed to get out of my funk and back into being actively frugal. Instead of focusing on what we couldn’t afford, I needed to start focusing on our financial goals of having a healthy emergency fund and paying down our debt.
So, with a little extra time this month, I set off to focus on our house, our kids and what little remains of summer. First, we made a list of some fun and frugal things we want to do at the end of the week and made our plans. There were so many things to do that we could afford. Next, I tackled the house.
One of biggest motivators for me is going through the stuff that we already have in the home. By organizing and decluttering, I get to:
- Come face to face with past buying decisions. There were a lot of “what were we thinking” moments when we realized that we just never got our money’s worth out of certain buys, especially the impulse ones and the “lifestyle” ones. What do I mean by lifestyle? Well, there was the piece of art that while nice really requires an entire redo of our home and style or the ice cream maker that represented some other family that could make fresh ice cream every night in designer clothes and without a single spill or squabble. In contrast, we’ve gotten every penny and then some out of our breadmaker, our close-out television and our floor model couch. Makes you picture a bunch of fat, couch potatoes that love carbs, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, our used elliptical machine was also a good buying decision for us.
- Evaluate underused assets. When I was done cleaning out a couple of trunks, I decided to rid us of two of them and turn the third one into a designer coffee table. For just a few dollars in supplies, I am able to get a new piece of custom furniture and put the money we might have spent toward paying off debt.
How do you get motivated to be frugal?
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