The Joys and Challenges of Frugality by Necessity-A Guest Post

This week I’m in San Diego, and several wonderful bloggers are providing me with guest posts. I specifically asked the various bloggers to provide articles on topics that I don’t feel qualified to write on. One of those areas is getting out of debt. Yankee Bill and I have never been in deep debt-we are frugal due to philosophical reasons and in order to maintain the lifestyle that we enjoy. PaidTwice, this weeks first guest blogger, blogs about her families journey working their way out of debt. I asked her to write about the trails and tribulations of that journey, as well as what it has taught her. . .

My family has been living under the weight of pretty significant debt for quite some time now. As our family grew from just my spouse and I, to adding a son, and then adding a daughter last October, the weight of the debt became heavier and heavier, until we came to the realization that not only *could* we do something about it, we *had* to do something about it.

And that is when we adopted several significant lifestyle changes that could be thought of as frugality by necessity. My spouse and I were not overly extravagant people to begin with, and do appreciate the simple things in life such quiet evenings with family and friends. But we were living a life barely within our means, which was doing nothing to rectify the time in the past we had lived above our means, or our significant student loans. When we made a commitment to doing more to eliminate our debt, we had to tighten our belts and make some serious budget changes and adopt a new attitude towards money. In some ways, that has been embraced with open arms, and in others, it has been a significant challenge.

One of the greatest joys we have found in frugality by necessity is a deeper and more thorough understanding of what we earn, what we spend, and what we value. Saving and spending money involves choice. We can choose to spend money on one thing, or we can choose to spend it on another, and which of the two we thoughtfully choose indicates where our values lie. Or we can choose to not spend on either, and save (or in our case, pay down debt with) that money. Our overall goal is to eliminate the debt in our lives, and through simplifying our budget, our purchases, and our lives, we have made choices as to what things we will continue to spend money on (or save money for) even during this focused debt paydown, and what things we are willing to forgo.

Another great benefit to this frugality by necessity is that by understanding and coming to terms with my own consumerism tendencies, I can start being a better role model for my children when it comes to accumulating “stuff”. I have been working on teaching them that less is more and that there is more to life than how many things we own. I in some ways already started late – even though my son is only 3, he has an enormous amount of stuff, but little by little we are paring it down and not adding to it, and teaching by example that a life with less “stuff” can be an even fuller one.

On the other hand, there are many things that have presented challenges for us in our new, more frugally-minded lifestyle. When I asked my spouse what the biggest challenge has been, he said simply, “Not buying stuff.” And that really sums up the majority of what we have found hard to adjust to. We were never ones to go out and buy a plethora of expensive things on impulse, but we didn’t really stop ourselves from buying a few small things each month to supposedly raise our standard of living. Having to carefully consider each purchase we make has indeed improved our life in a “big picture” sense in many ways, but it is a hard improvement to adjust to. We moved from an apartment to a house at the beginning of the year, and we’ve wanted so much to go out and buy a bunch of furniture and put in new floors downstairs and do a number of other upgrades, but we have not. My husband wants a Playstation 3 and I want a Dyson, but those things have to wait. If we still want them by the time we’re out of debt, we can save up for them and purchase them knowing that we truly wish to have them and are willing to forgo other things for them vs we just want them now now now. Which is a side benefit to our difficulty with the struggle against purchasing “stuff”, the “stuff” we do choose to buy has more value for us because it was carefully considered..

So, all in all, if nothing else, this lifestyle change, although not dramatic, has been enough to make us much more aware of how important freely spending money had become in our lives, and make us aware of and better able to fight our own accumulation tendencies. And that itself has been worth all the struggles we now face trying to fight decades of the impulsive purchasing habits we’d formed. I wouldn’t put myself into debt to learn this lesson again, but it has been a worthwhile lesson to learn.

paidtwice blogs at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… about her family’s journey in reducing and someday eliminating over $36000 of credit card, student loan, and automobile loan debt. In her travel towards increased frugality she often questions if she’s truly becoming more frugal or just cheap and the differences in those outlooks, and also if frugality can become an obsession. If you enjoyed this post feel free to check out her blog or subscribe to her RSS feed.