My husband and I each bought life insurance policies several years before our son was born.  We put them in a drawer and pretty much forgot about them ever since.  The payments are automatically deducted from our bank account, and there isn’t really anything else to think about.  And now that our son is almost 21 months old, we’ve finally gotten around to adding him as the contingent beneficiary on our policies.  Yes, I know… 21 months.  We are especially on top of things.

Anyway, now that we’ve checked that task off of the to-do list, we’re thinking that it’s high time we wrote wills and appointed a guardian for our son in case both of us were to die.  Not the most pleasant thing to ponder, but I know we should do it.  A friend of mine is pregnant at the moment, and she and her husband are in the process of doing the same thing, before the baby is even born.  Her super-responsible habits are inspiring me.

My husband and I are both close to our families, and there’s no drama or issues on either side.  I know that we don’t have to worry about things like wills being contested or anything like that.  But I suppose we should actually get it all down on paper, just to be sure.  Our situation isn’t particularly complicated – we own a home, have IRAs and a few other savings accounts.  But we also own our own business, which I guess could complicate things a bit.

I’m wondering if any of you have ever used will software?  I know that we could get a lawyer to do it for us, but my frugal nature (combined with the fact that I am 100% sure that all of our family would support our wishes, even if they were written on a napkin) means that I’m looking into less expensive options too.  Any thoughts are appreciated!

Apparently I’m a bit behind on reading personal finance blogs, because I just came across a couple of articles from February of last year.  They’re old, but make some great points and are very interesting reads.  Trent at The Simple Dollar wrote an article about how a media interviewer called him a cheapskate.  And then Him from Make Love Not Debt wrote about his thoughts on the topic.  I found both articles very interesting, along with the comments from readers.  It seems like everyone has an opinion, and two people can see another person’s frugality in very different ways.  My personal opinion – and we’re all entitled to one – is that I’d much rather hang out with Trent than Him.  I think Trent’s values are a lot more in line with my own, and from the articles I’ve read on his blog, he seems very happy with his life and choices.

But the articles brought up a deeper point than just the choices we make in our own lives and whom we choose as friends.  There was a lot of talk about judging others and self-righteousness – from both sides of the frugal – spendy spectrum.  I think that it’s somewhat natural to tend to think highly of others who are most like ourselves.  Most people tend to choose friends with whom they have a lot in common.   I would say that I’m probably the most frugal of my friends, but they’re all pretty focused on saving for a rainy day and for retirement, and none of them think less of me for shopping in thrift stores and driving an old car.

I do think of myself as frugal.  And I am happy almost 100% of the time.  For me, the connection between those two things is strong, and I believe that the simple life my husband and I have created for our family plays a large role in our happiness.  But I don’t think less of people who make different choices in terms of how they spend their money.  As long as those choices don’t impact the rest of us.  If a person chooses to spend all of their income each month (and I’m not talking about someone working for minimum wage who barely has enough for rent and food), that is none of my business.  But when I started hearing about mortgage bailouts after ARMs began to reset a couple years ago, I’ll admit to being irritated – especially when I read article after article about people who purchased houses that they could barely afford, even at the low introductory interest rate.  Bankruptcy is another example of something that drives up costs for everyone else, and it’s frustrataing when the bankruptcy is caused because a person consistently made choices to spend instead of save.  Yes, there are lots of cases where bankruptcy is caused because a person became too ill to work or suffered some sort of catastrophic circumstances, but there are also plenty of people who live paycheck to paycheck (despite having a good income) and are thus putting themselves in a situation where they have no ability to weather even the slightest financial storm.

What do you think?  Do you agree more with Trent or with Him?  Do you care about how other people choose to spend their money?  Are you more or less frugal than your friends?  Do you friends care?

I’ve written before about how I’m trying to buy less plastic.  I just read a really inspiring interview with Beth Terry from Fake Plastic Fish, and I’m ashamed to admit that on the rare occasions when we eat out, I’ve never thought to ask the waiter to bring my water without a straw.  Around the house, I’m doing pretty well, but we still have a long way to go.  Just about all of my food storage containers are glass now – I have a bunch of glass bowls and casserole dishes with lids that I use in the fridge, and I’ve been recycling jars into food storage for a while now.  Jars that once held olives, artichoke hearts, and almond butter now hold dried lentils, sesame seeds and walnuts.  I soak them in hot water until their labels peel off, and then glue on new labels for whatever I’m putting in them.  Jars like that used to end up in my recycling bin, but I figure this is an even more effective way of recycling them.

Once we get our garden going this summer, I’m hoping to dry a lot of food and my repurposed jars will be perfect for storing it all.  I can picture a whole shelf full of mis-matched jars filled with various garden goodies, and it makes me smile.

I try to avoid plastic quite a bit, and when I do buy it, it tends to be secondhand.  For the most part, I’d rather have things made of wood or glass or metal, and that’s pretty much what I see when I look around our house.  But the bulk food at the health food store where I shop comes pre-packaged in little plastic bags with twist ties at the top (there are no bins).  And when I look in our recycling bin each week, there are always several plastic containers that somehow made their way in there.

A month or so ago, I started dumping the contents of our indoor trash can into our outdoor trash can, without removing the bag from the indoor can.  We compost all of our food scraps and use cloth diapers, so there is never anything wet or disgusting in our trash can, and there’s usually not much in it at all.  I had noticed that each week we were removing the big plastic bag from the trash can and taking it out to be picked up with only a little bit of stuff in the bottom.  It started to seem like a huge waste of a big plastic bag.  I think it’s been about five or six weeks now that we’ve been using the same trash bag, and it’s working great.  I imagine that eventually it will get holes in it and I’ll have to start with a fresh one, but at this rate our huge box of garbage bags should last until we retire!

Beth’s Fake Plastic Fish site is a good read for anyone looking for inspiration to reduce consumption in general and consumption of plastic in particular.  Reducing consumption is the ultimate in frugal living, since it translates to not spending money.  And if there’s a greater purpose to it, that’s even better.

I love grocery shopping.  I have no interest at all in going to the mall, but I can happily spend an hour or so wandering around a grocery store.   We almost never eat out, and I cook just about all of our food from scratch, which helps to keep our total food costs reasonable.  According to our credit card spending report, we’ve average just under $600/month for the last 12 months at grocery stores.  In addition, we usually spend about $150/month at Costco, most of which is for food.  After housing, food is definitely our largest expense.

I usually go into town and do my grocery shopping once a week.  But it’s been 11 days now since I went shopping, and we’re still going strong.  I decided to see how long I could go without shopping, and it’s working great.  We have a pantry and freezer full of food, but I tend to focus on the fresh produce first, forget about the stored food, and then go back to the grocery store when I run out of fresh produce.  This time, I’m focusing on using up what we have before I go shopping again.  We have lots of dried legumes in the pantry, so we had lentil soup yesterday and we’re having black bean chili this evening.  I have been using greens from our cold frames for green smoothies, and combining them with dried greens that I have on hand (spirulina, several kinds of seaweed, wheat grass powder, and dried mint leaves).  I’m using up frozen veggies and bulk dried items.  We eat oats for breakfast every day, and since we buy our oats in 50 pound bags, we rarely have to replenish our supply.

Since we live in a small town now, we spend almost no money unless we go into the big town 10 miles from here.  That’s where the grocery store and thrift stores are, as well as most of the other places where we buy things; we try to combine trips, and schedule all of our errands to coincide with a grocery run.  So if we aren’t grocery shopping, we pretty much aren’t spending money at all.  We’re more than half way through our current credit card billing cycle, and we’ve had a total of 12 transactions so far.

I’m loving this challenge of making nutritious meals for my family just using what I already have on hand.  I’m finding that a little creativity goes a long way, and I’m hoping to make it to the weekend before I have to shop again.

Hello all, and Happy Sunday!  I wanted to share a couple of links with you, to sites that I’ve been using a lot lately.

I’ve mentioned that we’ve been transitioning to a mostly vegan diet, and I’m focusing a lot on raw food.  It makes sense, given that the vast majority of what we eat is veggies, fruits, and seeds.  When I shop, just about everything in my cart is from the produce department (which makes me really excited for the summer, when we will hopefully be growing most of it ourselves), and recipes for simple raw foods fit very well into our lives.  The Sunny Raw Kitchen has become a standby for me.  I love that there are so many recipes available on the site, for free, and categorized nicely in an index.  I also love that so many of them don’t require a dehydrator.  We are planning to get a dehydrator  in the summer, once we are ready to start preserving our produce, but for now, we don’t have one and I love that so many of the recipes on The Sunny Raw Kitchen don’t need one.  The “where’s the beef?” carrot mixture quickly became a staple around here, and I’ve been making it every few days for the last month or so.  It’s much more interesting than plain carrots, very inexpensive to make, and a great addition to salads and tacos.  Both my husband and my son love it, and it only takes about 3 minutes to make using a food processor.

I’m also loving Debra’s List, which is an amazing resource of eco-friendliness.  Debra has been green since long before it was cool, and her site is a wealth of information.  I especially like the section where she explains a lot of the things that she does around her own home.  It inspired me to spend a lot of today deep cleaning our house.  We can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on mattresses and furniture without toxic chemicals in them, but I can spend a few hours vacuuming all the nooks and crannies of our house (including the mattresses, an idea I got from Debra’s site) and washing our rugs and bedding.  In general, everything I’ve done to rid our house of toxins has been inexpensive or free.  The cupboard under our sink is full of bags of baking soda and jugs of vinegar that I use to clean pretty much everything, but I’m not going to spend $5000 on a new couch made of organic hemp.  I love that Debra’s site has ideas you can put into practice regardless of how much money you have.

I hope you can find something useful on one or both of these sites – they’ve both been fantastic resources for me, and I thought I’d share.

Lately my husband has been spending huge amounts of time researching investment strategies.  While we’ve both been committed to long-term savings goals for years, he’s really been getting into the nuances of it lately, and it’s made our retirement portfolios much more interesting to look at (of course they haven’t been much fun to look at this week, but that’s how it goes).  Between our various savings accounts and the extra principal payments we make on our mortgage, way more than half of our income goes into savings, and the new things we’re learning about investing just make us more motivated to keep it up.

We were talking today about how so many people with incomes similar to ours end up spending most of what they earn each month.  It would be easy to do, with payments on two newer vehicles, a more expensive home with a larger mortgage, several meals/movies out each month, some new (as in, not second-hand) clothes here and there… we started tallying up the money that an average middle class family could easily spend each month and it got high very quickly.

Then I started thinking about why people spend so much of their income rather than saving it.  For us, a healthy IRA balance is FAR more exciting than a new car, but I know that this isn’t the case for a lot of people.  In addition, a lot of people really don’t like their jobs, and feel huge amounts of stress over trying to balance work, family, fun, and all the rest of it.  But those same people might have brand new living room furniture, top of the line kitchen appliances, a new car, and a house with lots of custom upgrades.  The disparity between what they own and how they feel is striking.  Many of them are working at a job they don’t really enjoy, just to pay for all the things they own.

Some things are worth the money.  If a thing brings you great pleasure or gets used all the time, it was probably worth the money you spent on it.  My VitaMix blender is a good example.  It cost nearly $400, but I’ve used it at least twice a day (sometimes a lot more) ever since I got it in 2008.  It came with a 7 year warranty, and I can’t imagine my kitchen without it.  Each of us have things like that – a super comfortable piece of furniture, an outfit we feel great wearing, a vacation that created awesome memories… But a lot of us have things that we bought because we figured they would be impressive.  And often times, it wasn’t ourselves we were trying to impress.

This made me start thinking about my friends, and our relationships with each other.  I have friends with a wide range of incomes.  Some have fancy houses filled with fancy stuff, and others have apartments with futons that they’ve had since college.  And I can say for sure that I don’t care at all about any of it.  They’re my friends because I enjoy spending time with them.  They make me happy, and that doesn’t have anything to do with whether they have impressive “stuff.”  Think about your own life and the people you love.  Chances are, your friends and family don’t care about your stuff either.  When they come over to visit, it’s to see you, not your new living room set or big screen TV.  If you had to choose your five favorite people, my guess is that they would be the people who make you the happiest, who make you laugh, who provide a shoulder to cry on when you need it.  And whether or not they have a new car or a house with granite countertops probably has nothing to do with it.

Just food for thought for the next time that the urge to buy something impressive strikes (and yes, it strikes me sometimes too, although I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing it for what it is and moving on).  The people who love you will love you regardless of what possessions you own.  The people who would like you better if you had more fancy stuff probably aren’t worth keeping around anyway.  And a secure financial future will get you a lot further than anything you can buy at the mall.

Ok, I’m stepping down off my soapbox now.  Hope you all have a good weekend!

I just discovered a great new blog that I’m really enjoying.  Nature Mommy is written by Deborah Schneider, and is packed full of ideas about sustainable, eco- and budget-friendly parenting.  She and her husband are prospective foster-adoptive parents, and her blog is a great read for both current and future parents.

One of her posts, second-hand vs. sustainable, really resonated with me.  Sustainable, eco-friendly living is very high on the list of priorities for my husband and me.  We work hard to minimize our impact on the planet, and we definitely fall into the second-hand camp in the debate Deborah described.  The way I see it, any time we buy something second-hand, we’re contributing to a good cause (we mostly shop at Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity thrift stores) and we’re also completely eliminating the need for new products to be manufactured for our use.  In addition, we’re able to stretch our family’s budget much farther than it would have gone if we opted to buy things new.

Another great post on Deborah’s blog is about the baby gear she’s purchased, mostly used.  Our son is 20 months old, and our family budget has changed very little since he was born.  I see so many reports that warn parents about how their costs will go up dramatically when they have a child.  And I see plenty of my own friends – some of whom do not have a lot of money – spending big bucks on matching nursery furniture, coordinated bedding sets, disposable diapers, fancy toys… I feel sad for them, especially the ones who are struggling financially.  For us, the two major expenses since having our son have been his health insurance premiums (about $100/month) and his college savings account (another $100/month).  The health insurance is absolutely essential in my opinion.  The college fund is great if you can swing it, but plenty of kids get through college on scholarships and part time jobs, and a child is not going to be ruined because his parents couldn’t afford to pay for all or part of his education (we don’t plan to pay for all of it, but $100/month for 18 years will make a dent in his tuition bills someday).  Other than those two things, we’ve spent very little on our son.  We purchased a carseat and an organic crib mattress new, pretty much everything else has come from thrift stores and hand me downs.  Our son plays with jars of spices, pots and pans, wooden spoons, and large quantities of plain wooden second-hand blocks.  His crib sheets came from a thrift store, as do all of his clothes, and his curtains were made from second-hand sheets.  My mother and I made all of his diapers from old flannel sheets, t-shirts, and fleece sweatshirts.  We have probably spent less than $100 on diapering for 20 months, and the second-hand, high-efficiency, front-loading washing machine we got last summer has cut down dramatically on how much water it takes to keep the diapers clean.

Our frugal parenting is great for our our budget, but it’s also great for the environment, as we’re not contributing to a demand for new stuff, most of which would only be used for a short time, given how quickly children grow.  If you have a minute, I recommend taking a peek at Deborah’s blog and being inspired to live a life that is easier on your wallet and our world.

We recently bought a hanging plant for our dining room, but it came in a cheap plastic hanging basket that was both ugly and non-functional, since it had drain holes in the bottom but no tray to catch drips.  Inspired by the Thrifty Chicks, I went shopping for a lightweight enamel pot, and found one at Goodwill for three dollars.  A few holes drilled in the bottom turned it into a planter, and the lid turned upside down worked as a catch tray underneath. 

To hang it up, I used an old pair of my husband’s jeans that he had donated to my fabric stash.  I cut strips out of the legs, folded them over to make them double-strength, sewed strips together to get the length I needed, and then threaded them through the handles on the pot and the lid.  I sewed loops in the ends of the strips and threaded them through a carabiner that I found in the garage. 

Here’s the finished product, which cost a total of three dollars since all of the other supplies were things we already had:

My husband and I started our business in 2002, and have been growing it ever since.  The first few years were pretty rough financially.  We incurred a lot of debt, were earning very little, and basically had a life of forced frugality.  Eight years later, things are quite a bit different in terms of debt (only a mortgage) and income.  But our lifestyle has changed very little.  We still drive the same old cars (my husband’s is 20 years old, mine is 19), still buy all of our clothing and household stuff at thrift stores, still cook nearly all of our meals from scratch… We did have a big splurge in terms of entertainment a few months ago, when we signed up for Netflix – now we spend $9/month for movies.

As our income increased and our business grew stronger, we could have started spending a lot more money.  We could comfortably fit car payments and other doo dads into our monthly budget now.  The reason we don’t is because we are focused on the big picture and our long-terms goals.  Without those goals, there would be little to keep us from just spending our money as we earn it.

Our goals involve paying off our mortgage in order to be truly debt-free, saving as much as we can for retirement, and getting ourselves to a position of financial flexibility within the next 15 years or so.  By flexibility, I mean that we might not be quite to financial freedom at that point, but we’d like to be to a point where we can work less and be able to focus more of our attention on things that don’t necessarily bring in money.

Goals like that only work out if you break them into smaller steps that you can focus on regularly – otherwise, you wake up one day and realize that the 15 years have gone by and you’re still treading water.  So we’re paying extra on our mortgage every month – a concrete step.  We put 20% down on our house when we bought it last summer (thanks to the equity we had built up in our first house by paying extra on that mortgage for six years).  We got a 15 year loan with a 4.625% interest rate, and like knowing that every month, when we put additional money towards the principal, we’re cutting time off of that 15 year term.

For the retirement aspect, we’ve both been maxxing our our IRAs for a few years now (in the early years of our business, we could only afford $100/month in each account).  We also have an HSA that we’ve been contributing to since 2006.  Hopefully we’ll never need the money for medical bills and can use that account for retirement too – but it’s nice to know that the money is there (tax free) if we ever do have a medical emergency, since our health insurance deductible is $5000.

Since paying off our mortgage is a huge priority, there is very little temptation to spend our money on other stuff.  Having our IRAs, HSA, emergency fund, and our son’s 529 plan forces us to diversify and make sure that we’re working towards our other goals too, but the mortgage keeps us focused on the big picture, which is to be free of all debt.  It’s much more satisfying for us to see the balance dropping on our mortgage than to have a new pair of jeans.  Yes, the amount it’s going down each month is relatively small compared with the total balance, but over time, it adds up.

For us, big picture goals are what make frugality fun and exciting.  What keeps you frugal?  What are your big picture goals?  I’d love to hear your stories and what motivates you to make frugal choices every day.

Sometime later this year we’d like to start finishing our basement.  For now, it’s just a huge storage area, but we have big plans for it.  Our first financial priority this year is our HSA and our IRAs, but after that, we’re planning to start putting some money into the basement.  We’d like to use as much recycled, reclaimed, and salvaged material as we can for the project.  There are two Habitat for Humanity ReStores in the area, as well as at least two other construction material yards that sell salvaged materials.  In addition, I’ve been watching the free section on Craigs List.

Tonight, I hit the jackpot.

One of our plans for the basement is a workout room.  For now, my husband and I both do our workouts in our bedroom, and our weights are stored under our bed.  It works, but since we have all that space downstairs, a workout room makes sense.  One of the things I wanted for it was big mirrors, as we both feel that mirrors help us maintain our form when we exercise.  But mirrors – especially big ones – are not cheap.  Tonight I found a free listing on Craigs List for two wall mirrors; each one is 3 feet by 8 feet.  I have no idea how much those would cost if we were to buy them new, but I’m sure the price tag would give me shivers.  Happily, all we have to do to get these is drive ten miles into town.  I was the first response the lady had, so they’re ours.

For the last few days, I’ve kept the local Craigs List free page open as a tab on my computer, and I just refresh it every few hours.  As long as you can resist a whole lot of stuff that you might like but don’t really need (since that equals clutter!), it’s a great way to find awesome deals as soon as they get listed.