Meet a Reader | Kris from Michigan

We have a new Meet-A-Reader submission! Woohoo! Kris emailed to say she’d only been reading here since 2023, but as you will see, she’s been living the frugal life for a very long time. 🙂

1. Tell us a little about yourself

I’m a 53-year-old wife, mom, grandma, homesteader, and horse girl who has lived in Michigan her whole life, mostly in the lower part of the mitten section but briefly in the far northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula in my very early adulthood.

I became a mom right out of high school (whoops!), met my husband when I was barely 19 and he had just turned 21. We got married at 21.5 and 23.5 (when he graduated college in that far northern U.P. with a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering) and quickly had another son and two daughters.

Our sons are now 35 and 32 and our daughters are 30 and 27. We have 7 grandkids (boys 10, 5, 2, just turning 1, and 6 weeks; girls 12, and 4) with another granddaughter due this summer.

I’ve either owned or worked with horses since I was just shy of 13; since I was 16 I have footed the horse bills myself, typically by working at horse farms doing all manner of tasks.

I’ve cleaned a whole lot of stalls in 40 years, and my biggest piece of advice to anyone looking for ways to afford to own a horse: never be too proud to clean stalls.

Most farms are always in need of someone willing to muck stalls in exchange for all or part of their board fee. I’ve not only paid board bills by cleaning stalls, I’ve also through the years worked off the purchase of two different horses, leased a 3rd level schoolmaster warmblood horse for 2 years and earned ‘free’ dressage lessons.

Being a barn rat has frugal rewards. Get dirty, work hard, get exposed to cool opportunities!

My husband and I bought our first house in 1996 (3 years after we were married), a fixer-upper that we gutted and remodeled room by room while living in it, doing the vast majority of the work ourselves and more than doubling its value.

In 2002 we took the equity from that home and bought 40 acres of vacant land (10 wooded, 30 in crops) and proceeded to build a house from the ground up, again doing the majority of the work ourselves.

We deer hunt in the woods, tap trees for maple syrup, grow a big (about 1/4 acre) garden that provides a lot of our veggies for the year, and have a small orchard (about 10 trees–peach, apple, pear, tart cherry).

We also have a small flock of laying hens, raise meat chickens for family use, grow about 6 acres of hay, and since late 2023 I have a small horse boarding and training business here.

It’s never a dull moment around here and I can honestly say I don’t get a chance to be bored. There is always something to do/needing to be done.

In my ‘free’ time I also knit, quilt, sew/mend, do counted cross stitch, read and help as needed with the grandkids (all four of my kids live within about half an hour drive.)

2. How long have you been reading The Frugal Girl?

A little over two years, I think. I first saw it mentioned on another blog, checked it out, and immediately fell in love with the friendly positive tone of not just Kristen but also the commenters.

3. How did you get interested in saving money?

It started as a kid; growing up my dad was in college and then law school until I was 8 years old, and money was always tight. I think I was in my late teens by the time his student loans were paid off.

Becoming a single mom five months after I graduated high school also necessitated learning some frugal ways: like cloth diapering, breastfeeding rather than using formula (even when I worked), making baby food, thrift/secondhand shopping, bartering, and gladly accepting hand-me-downs for pretty much everything.

When I moved out of my parents’ house at 19 and in with my at the time boyfriend (who later became my husband; he transferred to a college in the Upper Peninsula 500 miles away and I went with him), I really had to learn to squeeze as much as I could out of every penny.

He was taking 18 credits a semester in college and couldn’t find a job that fit in on top of that, and I was working two minimum wage part-time jobs (about 50 hours a week) that barely covered rent and daycare expenses.

About two months into the first semester of being in the U.P., he and I looked at each other and realized that we couldn’t even afford a box of Hamburger Helper. That was the beginning of saving money by learning to cook from scratch!

Other new and money-saving skills followed in the ever-present need for making our meager income go as far as possible over the years as our family grew. Our second child had lots of environmental allergies and intolerances to food additives (artificial sweeteners, preservatives, artificial dyes and flavors, etc).

We couldn’t afford to buy organic food in an effort to avoid those things that gave our son so many problems with asthma, allergies and eczema, so I started growing a big organic garden and preserving food, as well as expanding my cooking from scratch to include all our baked goods.

(Side note: I’ve baked almost all the bread we’ve eaten in the last 27 years even when the kids were teens and we went through four loaves a week!)

By the time our 4th child was born, my husband’s job had him traveling about two weeks a month for 8-9 months of the year and my main task became being a stay-at-home mom who did it all (especially in his absence).

It made sense for me to stay home because daycare on 4 kids took all I made at a job, but left zero time for any cooking or money saving activities at home.

Plus, finding childcare for 4 kids in the evenings and on weekends was pretty much impossible when my husband was away working out of state. So my ‘job’ as an at-home mom was to make the money my husband made at his job stretch as far as possible.

4. What’s the “why” behind your money-saving efforts?

Through the years, there have been several times saving money was a matter of financial survival.

Honestly, that was most of the first 10 years we were together–like when my husband lost his job (and our insurance) shortly after our third baby was born, again when our fourth was just a few months old, and during the Recession in the mid-2000’s.

And in 2020, while my husband was able to work from home, his company required him (and all their engineers) to take a 20% pay cut; we had pretty much all the same expenses with 20% less income.

We’ve always been aggressive with investing for retirement, trying to put aside the maximum percentage of my husband’s income that his employer would match. He just missed (by being hired a few months too late) being one of those lucky engineers of a Big Three auto company with a great pension and company-paid healthcare to look forward to.

Instead, when he retires, we will only have what money we’ve been able to put aside and will have to purchase our own health insurance. That unknown health insurance cost is a scary thought.

In the financially easier times, and now as we look ahead towards retirement becoming sooner rather than later (my husband is hoping to retire by the time he turns 60 in 2029), we have often purposely chosen to be frugal.

After so many years of practicing a frugal mindset it’s become ingrained to ask ourselves, “Is this thing necessary or do I just want it? If it’s a want, what use/enjoyment will I get out of owning/doing it? Is that worth the cost in money (and the time spent in making the money)? Do I need to buy it brand new, or can I find it in good shape secondhand for a better price?”

We see money as a tool that should work for us, rather than us blindly working for money.

5. What’s your best frugal win?

There have been many through the years. The first was probably the avocado green freezer my husband paid $20 for at a garage sale in 1991 when we moved in together; we still use it!

Another is the little fixer-upper house we bought on land contract with payments that were less than what we’d been paying in monthly rent. We fixed it up, added on to it, and sold it seven years later for more than double what we’d paid for it.

Another win: bartering some chainsaw work (trimming up and removing several large trees for a friend) for a reliable used car that became our first ‘teenager car’ as our kids became drivers.

6. What’s an embarrassing money mistake you’ve made?

Not regularly putting money into a savings account.

Instead, that money has gone to large mortgage payments –we refinanced our 30-year mortgage with 20 years left into a 10-year mortgage. That saves us a ton of interest over the life of the loan, but didn’t leave enough of a cushion to build up a savings account for disasters (especially during that 20% pay cut during Covid) like a dead refrigerator that then had to be bought on a credit card.

And, well, horses aren’t cheap.

Their care costs a lot, yet barn owners (as I am now) don’t make much money off of boarding other people’s horses. What I make for my time spent as a caretaker of clients’ horses is just enough to cover the food, farrier, and vet bills of my own horse.

If I wasn’t addicted to horses (anyone who has horses for decades is either rich or addicted, and I sure ain’t rich, LOL), we could have put a whole lot of money into savings and other things over the years.

7. What’s one thing you splurge on?

Brand new vehicles.

Our last four vehicles (for my husband or I) we have bought new off the lot/company used (driven by upper tier engineers– a benefit of their level– then sold by the manufacturer for many thousands off sticker price when they hit 4000ish miles).

However, we have two rules:

• We can only have one car loan at a time
• We keep the vehicle until either it doesn’t run anymore (I have driven the same Suburban for 20 years now and it has over 300,000 miles on it) or something major breaks on it that isn’t worth it to us to repair (usually somewhere after 200,000 miles).

The car we recently bought to replace my Suburban will, conceivably, be the last car I own as I don’t drive much anymore.

And given that it took me almost 20 years to get to 300k miles on the Suburban–10 years of which I was running kids to/from school and sports constantly– I’ll probably be in my 80s before I get that many miles on the new car.

8. What’s one thing you aren’t remotely tempted to splurge on?

Girly stuff: clothes, hair styles, decor.

I’m a brush-and-go girl where my hair is concerned, no interest or time for coloring or styling it. If it can’t go in a ponytail, a braid, or a bun, it’s too much trouble.

At 26, I once got my hair chopped into a chin length bob. It was cute, but after about three days I hated it because it was so time consuming and required washing every morning, blow drying and applying product to make look good (and not squashed from sleeping on it) compared to my air-dried long hair with its three ways of being fixed.

I decided then and there I was never going to have short hair again.

9. If $1000 was dropped into your lap today, what would you do with it?

Agonize for a couple of weeks how to best use it: something needful/useful as an investment, stick it in the ‘just in case fund’, or take a fun and memorable trip?

Then most likely I’d put it toward one of the many household/homestead projects that are forever on the list.

10. What’s the easiest/hardest part of being frugal?

The easiest is once it’s ingrained, you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.

You also see opportunities you used to miss before your brain tuned in to frugalness. (Like doing chainsaw work/cleaning up storm damage for people after a big storm in exchange for the firewood when you heat with wood. . .)

The hardest part of being frugal is that a lot of things that are money-saving are time-consuming. If you don’t have time to spend cooking, gardening, making, mending, bargain hunting, cutting and hauling free firewood, etc, it’s hard to be frugal.

11. Is there anything unique about frugal living in your area?

Although I’m only about 30 minutes from the state capitol, I’m kind of out in the country, so in some ways it’s hard to be frugal.

There’s no public transportation (bus) within about 12 miles of my house. You pretty much have to own a car and drive yourself everywhere. There’s no Buy Nothing group nearby that I can join (both the ones I’ve found in nearby–10 to 15 miles away–towns require you to have an address in that town, which I don’t.)

There’s no corner store to run to in a pinch as the nearest place to buy groceries is 6+ miles away.

On the flip side of that, having land and being able to garden and hunt and have chickens and line dry my laundry 6 months a year is a benefit to frugal endeavors that people in towns don’t have.

If I want to drive 10-30 miles or so, there are many more free/cheap things to do than there used to be; more hiking trails being built/maintained, some outdoor bandshell concerts in the summer at a sorta local park, several thrift stores, etc.

What frugal tips have you tried and abandoned?

I don’t make my own noodles.

I tried it a few times, but while it was easy enough to make noodles, the task of drying enough noodles to have on hand in the pantry to feed 6 people was huge and took up my whole kitchen and dining room. It just wasn’t worth it compared to the relatively low price of noodles from the store.

And while I have made my own (scent-free, dye-free) laundry soap for over 25 years now, I buy dishwasher powder. I tried the homemade dishwasher powder many long years ago and it just didn’t work well with our hard water (we have well water).

What’s your funniest frugal story?

When my oldest son was a sophomore in high school, we were still pretty new to the community, having finished building our house and moving onto our homestead right at the start of his freshman year.

One day he told me about a comment one of his classmates made: they said they couldn’t figure out if he was rich or if he was poor.

The evidence for poor was:

• he rode the school bus to and from school (until he got a part time job his junior year he didn’t have a car for his own use)
• he packed his lunch from home
• we didn’t eat out
• we didn’t go to the movies
• we drove older vehicles
• he had to share a bedroom with his brother (and his sisters shared their own bedroom)
• we only had/have one tv, one computer and one nintendo for the entire family to use

The evidence for rich was:

• we owned a bunch of land
• we lived in a brand new house
• through 8th grade he and his siblings went to private (parochial) school
• I was always around before and after school and on weekends not away at work (I worked during school hours at a nearby horse farm once my youngest child started kindergarten.)

Which is your favorite type of post at the Frugal Girl and why?

I love the Five Frugal Things and the WIS, WWA posts.

It’s always fun to see what big or little frugal victories other people are having.

And the WWA is nice for getting ideas for menus; I tend to get in a rut with my cooking since most of it is based on meat we have in the freezer and what veggies are in the cellar/freezer/pantry in canning jars.

Also, being from the Midwest my entire life, casseroles and potato-based things are what’s ingrained in my brain as affordable, but are not good for me trying to eat enough to be full but not have too many carbs.

I’m type 2 diabetic since 2018 (successfully controlling my blood sugar through balancing my macronutrients) and I need new ideas of things to eat so I don’t get burned out cooking the same healthy(ish) things over and over.

Do you have any tips for frugal travel or vacations?

When my husband and I travel these days, we tend to try to stay at places that include a kitchenette and if possible, an outdoor grill. That way we can make our breakfasts and dinners, and pack a lunch to take with us on excursions.

When the kids were growing up, if we weren’t going up north to visit my mother-in-law and stay at the family owned cabin (built by her parents), we would often go camping, first in tents and later in campers. Meals were always cooked at the campsite.

Our first camper was a pop-up we bought just before taking all the kids to Disney World–we discovered that we could buy a used pop-up camper and stay in the Fort Wilderness campground for cheaper than a hotel room that could sleep six people for 5 days.

Years later, we bought a larger bunkhouse style camper just before a trip from Michigan to Oregon to go to a family reunion out there; the camper was, again, cheaper than paying for lodging over the course of the trip, and we sold it the following year for the same amount we’d paid for it.

Those camping/camper days are full of great memories that our (now adult) kids like to recall and laugh about our adventures (and misadventures, like when the big camper blew a tire going over a pass at 10,000 feet in Wyoming on a very narrow road.

Or, same trip, when we pulled off the side of the expressway in Nebraska, made ham sandwiches for lunch and ate them beside the camper while watching 3 tornadoes pass by in the distance–the direction we needed to travel–before we got on the road again and drove where the tornadoes had been half an hour before).

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Kris, I 100% agree on the noodle-making. I dabbled in that as a teenager and my goodness, it was so much work for something that costs so little at the store. Noodle-making is for the factories, I say. 😉

Also, I am with you on the hair. I almost always have hair that’s long enough to put up into a ponytail/bun/clip because that’s so easy and practical.

I am super impressed with your homesteading abilities; I love that you and your husband have worked so hard to build what you have. I can imagine that is so very satisfying. You have built a rich life for yourselves. 🙂

Thank you for sharing!

Readers, the floor is yours! Leave your questions/comments for Kris, and she promised to pop in and respond.