It’s easy to get competitive about this frugality thing, even when you’re not typically a competitive person!
When Chrissy and I first began cutting our budgets back we would shop together and lay out our loot for a mini show and tell with our husbands. This became quite a fun game each week but my husband (a competitive spirit) would always wonder why Chrissy was spending less than I was or vice versa!
As we became more familiar with the “shopping world” and the frugal blog community it was hard not to anticipate everyone’s weekly report…comparing what we bought vs what other people bought and how much more or less we each spent…enough already!!!
After we started our face to face workshops we were consistently asked, “how much do you spend each week?”. Our response to that is “it doesn’t matter”.
If you’ve been around our blog much you will have noticed that we aren’t frugal to the extreme. We are regular Moms looking to cut back as much as is practical and to do so while still keeping our sanity day to day with two very young children. We eat pretty healthy and at various times over the past year at least one of us has had a child on a special diet. We don’t eat out much but seriously, who can with children! We also have little time to snag those fun freebies at McD’s or the local ice cream place so you won’t often see those on our blog!
Our practice is simple, we have only started buying things differently, not buying different things……and for us that’s really the key to being frugal!
It doesn’t matter how much you spend, what matters is that you get the MOST you can for the least amount out of your pocket.
We don’t even attempt to cut our budgets further than we already have because there are some very specific wants and needs each of our families has.
We realize there are bloggers and non-bloggers out there feeding their family of 6 or 8 on close to half of what we spend and sometimes wonder, are we off the mark this week??
The answer is alwyas NO! And, we applaud them, and everyone else reading this, all for the same reasons…
1) Realizing that you can spend less on the things your family uses
2) Taking the necessary steps to learn about it and do it
3) Only sacrificing where you want to…
4) Being proud of your shopping compared to how YOU used to shop not compared to how others around you shop!
