Monday Q&A-edition #1

Ok! Here are the answers to several questions I received.

1. Is your family in the median income in your area?

I had to look this up…according to the census reports I read, we’re at about $13K below the median household income. So, we’re certainly not at poverty level, but we’re not living on an enormous salary either.

2. What things does your family forego or did you eliminate on your way to frugality? (like cable tv, Netflix, salon haircuts, etc)

We’ve actually never lived a super spendy lifestyle. My husband worked in a warehouse for a lot of our marriage(he works in IT now), and I’ve always worked very part-time, and so we haven’t had a lot of money to be spendy with!

However, a few years ago we bought this house, which brought a higher mortgage payment, and our electric company raised their rates 70%, and so we had to take a closer look at our spending. We were only paying $15 a month for our basic cable, but we decided to cancel that to save some money(and time! TV can be a big time-waster). We also cut our eating-out budget down to about $0 a month. We used eat a simple fast-food type meal once a week, spending $10-$20 each time. When we realized that added up for $40-$80 a month, we decided that was something we could forgo. We also tried to cut back on the discretionary spending.

Really, I don’t look at frugality through a “What do I have go give up?” sort of lens(except when it comes to skimping on heat!). I think we live full, happy lives without spending lots of money, and I think that in many ways, frugality makes our lives better(which is a topic I’m hoping to post on in the future).

3. Why did you start blogging?

Well, for years and years, people who’ve observed my frugal lifestyle have been telling me that I needed to write a book. While I was enthusiastic about the idea of helping other people save money, the thought of writing a book was very overwhelming to me. I’m busy, and I don’t really have the time to write an entire book. When I blog, though, I don’t have to write chapters…I can just write a couple of paragraphs each day, and so it’s a good fit for me.

I initially started blogging about my food waste so that I could keep myself accountable while I tried to unlearn my wasteful habits. After I’d done that for several months, I felt a little more comfortable with the whole idea of blogging, and I decided to branch out and do a blog on frugality. I didn’t want to stop posting about food waste, though, and so I decided that I’d just incorporate the weekly food waste photos into my frugal blog posts. After all, avoiding food waste is a very frugal thing to do.

Knowing that people have been helped and inspired by my posts makes me motivated to keep on writing…I’m thrilled to be able to help other people save money and I feel honored that so many of you come to read my posts each day.

Frugality is really soaked into my lifestyle and as I go about my day, I’m always thinking of new topics to post about. I doubt I’ll run out of things to say for quite some time. 😉

And to round things out, here’s a question that doesn’t relate to money.
4. How did you and your husband meet?

The short story is that we met at church. I was almost 18, and had never had a boyfriend before(I wasn’t interested in dating before I was ready to consider marriage), so my husband is my one and only. 😉 We got married a little less than a year after our relationship officially started, and we’ll be celebrating our 12th anniversary in August.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

If you want to have a question answered in a future Q&A post, just send me an email: TheFrugalGirl [at] gmail [dot] com. If you could put “Q&A” in the subject line, I’d really appreciate it!