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Welcome to Centsable Savings Stories and Struggles!
This week we are featuring Jenn who blogs at Frugal Mom Jenn. Jenn has been a friend of mine for the past year and a half. My daughter and her oldest daughter are only days apart in age. Now we have our frugal pursuit in common as well. We live across the country from each other, and we’ve never actually met, but I consider her to be a good friend. Thank you for sharing your story, Jenn!
My Family
I’m Jenn, a 35-year old occupational therapist and the married full-time parent of two little ones who are both under two-years-old.
My History
I have always been the ‘baby’ of my family growing up. The youngest of 4 siblings (by an 11-year gap!), I was always over-indulged to a degree, which set the stage for some awful spending habits in my twenties. After accruing debt and getting bailed out by my parents several times as a single woman, I finally met the man of my dreams and we married in 2005. Together we had a vision of a house and family and slowly lowered our combined debt as we saved for our future. Pregnant with our first child a year after moving in to our home we knew that I would have to continue working after my maternity leave as much as we both wanted me to be able to stay home with the baby. Four months after the birth of our first child I was pregnant again (I still can’t believe we planned this!), and we had to come up with a plan so that I could become the full-time parent that I dreamed of.
My Struggles
After the birth of our first child we decided to use my income alone to pay for her childcare and put the rest into savings. This way we would be forced to live on my husband’s income alone, and any money we saved would serve as a cushion for the future. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as we had hoped – there were many months we came up a bit short with our budget – but we worked hard to smooth out the kinks. I had to learn how to stop years of habitual impulse buying, which was pretty difficult for me. What really drove me, however, to curb my spending was keeping the end goal in sight…I really wanted to be home to raise my girls.
My Blog and My Stores Before the birth of our first child we started a family blog, and my love of blogging was born! It wasn’t until the birth of our second child that I started to read about ways that other moms were able to save money and dramatically reduce their monthly grocery costs. I quickly became addicted to cutting coupons, analyzing grocery store circulars for the best deals and mapping out weekly saving strategies! I posted on our family blog about one of my best shopping trips because I could hardly contain my enthusiasm, and my Frugal Mom Jenn blog was born! I cover ShopRite on this blog for BeCentsAble.
My Best Deal to Date
Since I only started this frugal journey a few months ago I’m still trying to beat my current best, but as of today it was a trip to ShopRite that garnered the following, which you can even catch a picture of on my blog:
Cost of items before coupons = $28.56
Coupons tendered = $22.63
Final out of pocket cost = $5.93
Frugal doesn’t mean “cheap” – it means shopping smart and has quickly become a passion of mine!
Each week we feature a different shopper’s story. Centsable Savings Stories are the stories of people just like you who are working toward reducing their budgets, bargain hunting, living a more frugal lifestyle and constantly learning along the way. If you are interested in sharing your family’s successes and struggles, please contact Katherine at centsable.katherine[at]gmail [dot]com. Blogger and non-bloggers are both welcome to participate. Click here to read the stories of shoppers featured in the past.
Now it’s time to share your great deals for the week! Leave a link or a comment below.
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