Monday, January 18, 2010

Back to Frugal Basics

Around this time of year, a lot of people start to think about ways to save money and live better. I consider myself a pretty frugal person, but even so January is a good time to re-evaluate some of my choices. These days I don't feel nearly as frugal as I used to, and it seems that there are more failures than successes. Somehow, even with more time to do things, I'm spending more money and going overbudget in a number of categories.

So I've decided it's time to get back to frugal basics. I'm going to start from scratch, remake my budget and reevaluate everything. I'm hoping to be able to cut some money from some budget categories to be able to put into savings or debt reduction, or even into other priorities, but my main goal is not necessarily to get things back to how they used to be. It's to re-evaluate everything and decide what elements of my budget are worth spending money on, and which ones aren't.

I'm hoping to motivate myself to do more projects and make more things from scratch, but I know that that's not the real key to frugal living. The key to frugal living is to be deliberate about where you spend your money and where you don't. Here's to being more deliberate.