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.
We're finding a big key for us is just staying home. When we relocated to this rural area a year ago we were anxious to get back into town all the time because we were uncomfortable being out of touch with the malls and stores we were familiar with. Now we've grown more comfortable keeping ourselves busy at home and only heading into town on shopping day. It saves us big time.
ReplyDeleteHi. Check out my money blog
ReplyDeletehttp://moneyhoneysf.blogspot.com/
Keep up the great post and hope you do go back to frugal basics. I am trying to as well and it's much easier when it's a New Year and you can set this as a new goal.