Q&A | Frugality with a houseful of little kids

I assume that the way things get done and the amount of time you have to spend on things change as your family grows and kids get older.   Has your “frugalness” changed a lot since your kids were little and you had babies around the house? I know you were still frugal, but did it look different? Did you make your own yogurt when you had little little kids?

Just curious what your thoughts are looking back on that life stage.
1) what frugal things did you do that you have currently stopped doing
2) what frugal things do you wish you had done?
3) what current frugal practices do you do that would have been impossible to do with little kiddos.

Another side question….with all of the containers you send to work/school, doesn’t it accumulate a ton of dishes? Is that ever hard to keep up with?

Heather

I’ll answer the second question first! Since I have a dishwasher, the lunch containers don’t feel like a big deal.   They’re almost all dishwasher-safe, so it takes a minimum amount of effort to wash them.

We do hand-wash plastic lids, as they seem prone to cracking in the dishwasher, but they really only take a few minutes to wash so it’s never seemed like a big deal to me.

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About frugality and the small-kids stage: Yes, my life has changed some over the years as my kids have gone through different stages, but interestingly enough, I don’t find that I actually have more time to do frugal things now than I did when my kids were all little.

(2006. Zoe’s the white lump on my chest. 😉 )

The thing is, small kids and big kids are both harder in some ways and easier in some ways.

For instance, small kids do require a lot of hands-on attention while they’re awake, but then again, there are naps and early bedtimes.   Older kids are always awake. 🙂

And I spent a lot of time changing diapers and wiping faces and giving baths when my kids were little, but now that those tasks are gone, there are things like homeschooling, driving them to activities, teaching them to drive (!), helping them get jobs, taking them to jobs and so on.

(I actually used to be able to stay home a lot more when my kids were littler, which made me more able to cook, sew, bake, and so on.)

Anyway, thus far, I haven’t found that any particular stage of parenting leaves you with oodles of time on your hands. 😉

Another complicating factor is that as my kids have gotten older, I’ve felt like I have a little less time, and a little more money (when they were small, I had more time than money, largely because the money was in such short supply!).

(Zoe and Sonia, 2008. Also, energetic cousin in the background.)

To answer your questions:

1) What frugal things did you do that you have currently stopped doing?

I no longer do coupon shopping, which I used to do in the days when there were doubled $1 coupons (now that I have Aldi, I don’t need to do couponing!)

And I don’t spend time chasing the drugstore deals, because it takes too much time.

I don’t line-dry laundry because I discovered I hated it.

2) What frugal things do you wish you had done?

I’m not sure I can think of much, aside from wishing I’d worked harder on my food-wasting habits.   We kept our spending pretty darn low in those years because we had to, and I’m not sure we could have been a whole lot more frugal than we were!

I do wish we’d been able to start focusing on retirement savings earlier than we did, but there’s not much we could have done about that because it’s not our spending that kept us from saving; it was our lack of income.

And until our efforts to increase our income became fruitful, we just couldn’t do much toward retirement.

(Here are the things I tell myself when I’m discouraged about that, though.)

3) What current frugal practices do you do that would have been impossible to do with little kiddos?

You know, the first thing that comes to mind is that blogging would have been hard to keep up with when they all were small!   Doing frugal things without blogging about them is a lot less time consuming. 😉

As I’ve been mulling over your questions, I’ve been thinking about how comparing one person’s frugal living with another’s could be helpful, but could also be barking up the wrong tree.

I was super frugal even when my kids were little, but it’s partly because it’s who I am, and also because I either had to be frugal or go into debt.   When those are your choices, then you place a pretty high premium on money-saving activities and you find time to make them happen.

But if you are in a situation where finances aren’t quite that tight, and you don’t need to squeeze every last drop out of each penny, that’s ok too!   Living on an extremely tight budget because you have to isn’t exactly fun, and if you can afford to not exercise black-belt frugality in some areas, it’s ok to do that (especially if you feel like that’s saving your sanity as you mother small kids.)

(2009)

So, rather than asking yourself, “Am I keeping up with what Kristen did when her kids were little?”, I think a better question is, “Am I making choices with my time and money that are good for my situation in life, that reflect my priorities, and that serve my family?”

The right time and money choices can vary SO widely from family to family and from life stage to life stage, you know?

Try to figure out what’s best in your life with the money, time, and skills you’ve been given, and don’t sweat it if what’s best for you doesn’t look like what’s best for everyone else. 🙂

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Readers, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, especially those of you who’ve experienced both small-kid-parenting and big-kid-parenting!Save

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