Best and Worst-One Each!

Frugal Guy tagged me almost 2 weeks ago with a down and dirty Frugal Living Meme. Actually, I don’t even know if you need to call it a Meme, as it really is one simple sentence:

“Please write a post about one thing you do well and one thing you do poorly with respect to saving and spending money.”

Interesting, no?

(by the way, if you want to play along, just head on over to his original post “Frugal Living Meme” and let him know in the comments that you’ve written the appropriate post. I’m sure he’d love the additional participation)

So, better late than never, here I go.

The best thing I do in regards to frugal living is cooking from scratch.

If you were to come to my house and peek in my cabinets, you would see almost nothing in the way of prepared food. Yes, I have some boxed brownie and cake mixes, the mandatory pudding and jello packets, and an occasional frozen pizza for emergency situations. I do keep a package or two of hot dogs on hand, and usually a large bag of fish sticks that mostly get used when Yankee Bill and I go out for the evening and I need a quick meal for the kiddos.

Oh, and I do buy store bought bread etc.

Other than that-most things are made from scratch. I make my own biscuits, I make my own burritos (the tortillas are store bought), I buy large cans of fruit and repack them into small containers for Princess’s lunch. Chips etc are a treat not a normalcy. Dinners start with ingredients, not boxes.

Part and parcel of all of that is we almost never order out pizza or get takeout. This past week of vacation aside, we don’t eat dinner or lunch out very often either. Yankee Bill and I probably eat out a couple of times a month (although he frequently eats lunch out due to work-He’s on the road almost constantly) and I limit the lunchtime forays with the kids to the fast food joints or buffets. (Buddy gets a 4 piece of nuggets and some fries 2X a month after my MOPS meeting with a glass of water, and on a typical month maybe I take them both out one other time.)

I do this because it is healthier and cheaper, and because I have the time (remember-stay at home mom here!), although admittedly I did cook mostly from scratch even when I worked-I was just more stressed about it.

The worst thing I do in regards to frugal living is impulse buying.

Yes, I know. I know. I really do know better. The only thing I can say in my defense is that most of my impulse buys these days are at the dollar store, the thrift store, something deeply discounted or something that isn’t very expensive to start with. But I still have too much stuff. And I still wind up with things that I buy because I just HAVE to have them, and then never use/need/find/want etc.

A case in point-I bought some cute little Easter snow globes at the dollar store for the kids to put in their Easter baskets. Do we need them? No. Were they cute? Yes. And they were cheap. But to get the nice ones I bought them when they were first displayed in late February, then hid them in the closet.

You guessed it. They are still in the closet. Now I am stuck with the dilemma~do I keep them for next year and hope I remember or just give up the ghost and sell them in the yard sale? I think I’ll pack it away with the Easter decorations, but that was $2 I really didn’t need to spend at all.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking “Jenn, cut yourself a break. You don’t have to be frugal every minute. You deserve to buy some little things for yourself.” That is true-and if it was only once in a while. . . . but I think I’ve gotten into a bad habit justifying it by the cheapness of the individual items.

Something for me to think about and work on anyway. As I’ve said before, if you don’t really need it then it isn’t a bargain, no matter how cheap it is.

Related posts:

1. Easter Idea Roundup
2. Easter on a Budget
3. What Would You Do?
4. What is frugal living?
5. Don’t Panic!!!