Frugal Living

Updated on January 24, 2020

Do you consider yourself to be frugal? I try to be. With being a stay at home mom with two kids living on one person’s income, we have to be careful what and how we spend. The last few months I have not really been all too careful, and unfortunately those are our slowest months of the year. Yikes!

Repinly

So, to try to get back on track, I am planning on having a ‘no spend month’ for the rest of the month of September. This is not exactly what it sounds like. It isn’t that we are not going to spend anything for the month. I am just going to try to be more careful and mindful about our spending and try to not spend money on anything ‘extra’ this month!

The Meta Picture

What will this mean for my family? No eating out, no extra entertainment expenses, no crafty expenses (for me), try to conserve gas, try to be careful about grocery spending. This comes at a perfect time for me, as I plan on doing a ton around our house.

I am busy working on sprucing up the house with a fall cleaning. Have you been over to The Nester lately? Every October for the last three years she has done a 31 days series. She spends all 31 days of October focusing on one blog topic, posting one post per day. I plan on joining along this year and I will be sharing my ’31 days to a Deep Cleaned House’. I am busy working on own house this month, so I will be all ready to post for you next month!

Also, last year, I wrote about how I can do more by doing less. I talked about how I am always adding more and more to my plate, starting a project here and there, but not really get a whole lot completed. Sad to say, I still have not completed everything on the list – over a year later! I need to get back to working on finishing up some of the projects I have had laying around. These won’t cost me anything since most of them have already been started!

Lastly, I posted recently about how I have been feeling lately and how I was going to ‘fake it until I make it.’ Well part of my stress comes from our finances. We are in no way in bad shape, but we can always do better! This will help ease my mind a little that we really can make it on less and I think by going back to focusing on being at home and getting things done, it will do wonders for improving my situation! Also, I tend to shop (even if it is only at Dollar Tree) just to get out of the house and to have something to do. Even these small trips can add up to a lot by the end of the month. Plus, when I am shopping, when I don’t really ‘need’ something, I often regret my purchase and just have that much more crap in my home to deal with.

Have you ever done a limited spending month and go back to bare necessities? Did it work for you? Do you have any tips for me to make this easier?