Warning:
This really isn’t all that dramatic.. but it’s not that hard, either.
Here's what we did:
- We paid
off our credit cards every month and never had to pay interest on them.
- We lived
slightly better than we did as college students.
We avoided lifestyle creep, where you gradually buy nicer and nicer
things, go on bigger and better vacation, have to have the latest greatest
bill-in-the-blank because you are able to.
I think lifestyle creep is a huge reason that many middle-class folks
people don’t save much. (“Let’s buy it
because we can afford it now” is such a bad idea!) We pretty much do it our way, and spend
money where we value it, and not where everyone else says we should. That is enormously liberating and really
cheap.
- A lot of
being able to pay off the house early came from a total lack of interest in
keeping up with the Joneses. Our friends
are ordinary folk, many of whom are also pretty frugal, usually so that they
can afford to have a stay-at-home parent.
I don't try to keep up with our wealthier friends. It helps that I don't particularly want
expensive clothes or electronics — I’d just get chocolate on the clothes and
break or lose the expensive toys! (I’m
very fond of chocolate — and really, really clumsy!)
Example:
I work in an office with lots of elegantly dressed women. However, I own only two pairs of
black shoes, black flats and sketchers.
- We spend
money on the stuff we truly enjoy like travel and board games, and sometimes
biking and gardening. We don't spend it mindlessly or on autopilot. I have thrift
store clothes but I joined my mom and sister on a trip to Europe one year and
the next spent five weeks in Croatia, including nine days on an island in the
Adriatic with my in-laws. The fact that
I do the one makes the other one much easier to afford. Plus I don't feel deprived because I get to do want I really want to do.
- What we
do to entertain ourselves is more active.
We create things. We do
projects. A bonus is that that helps us
solve problems, like we’ll build our own shelving that is custom-designed for
what we want to put on it.
- We don't
spend money we don't have. We save up or do without.
- We avoid monthly bills. I have
a smart phone, for example, but it was a gift from a wealthier relation who is
upgrading, and I've never gotten a plan for it because I don't want to pay that
data plan every month. We don't avoid
monthly bills entirely, of course – who could?
But our little flip phone doesn't cost much. (Actually, we should probably reevaluate that
at some point and make sure that that is still true!)
- Leisure doesn't have to be pricey. We enjoy books and movies
from the library, which is free. My hobbies,
at least, tend to be pretty inexpensive like crafting from recycled materials,
as opposed to shopping, golf, etc. We
like to geocache, which is free after you've bought the GPS. (We have had the same one for 20 years. It still works.)
Example:
On Sunday we spent time with our dear friend Anne. We talked, we went for a walk around a lake,
we got groceries and then made dinner together.
After dinner we played a board game. It was a lovely day and far less
expensive than dinner and a movie for three people, or chatting over cocktails.
As far as
the more extreme things, like gardening to grow some of our own food and sewing
to make some of our own clothes, I think those helped more as a reminder of our
frugal identity than as a whole lot of actual cash savings. Yes, making or growing what you want instead
of buying it is cheaper. But it's more
along the lines of: "If I'm the sort of person who spends all day Saturday
making a skirt, it doesn't make sense to blow $200 on leather boots.” Plus I
enjoy sewing and gardening, and I have deliberately cultivated hobbies that save money.
Paying
off the house was really slow, really steady, really not all that
dramatic. If it is something you would
like to do, you can start the way we did — by putting a little extra towards
the mortgage every month. We made exactly
two normal mortgage payments the entire time we paid on the house, and that was
because my husband was out of work.
Every other payment was something extra, even if it was only $100.
