Today is Saturday, and I’m writing Friday’s blog post.
It’s also October 4th and Andy and I have not made our budget for the month yet.
Sometimes you break your own rules. But as someone in the #Write31Days Facebook group kindly stated, last year she missed a few days of the challenge and no one has come to arrest her yet. Somehow I don’t think anyone will come after me, either.
Normally I am pretty frugal. I’m not sure when exactly it started. I think I knew a few people who did coupons to the max, and mostly I was just jealous of their ability to save crazy precentages of their grocery bills. It started out as a challenge to me, but then it became more of a way of life.
Once you know that you can save money on certain items, it becomes extremely difficult to pay full price for them!
But sometimes you break your own rules.
Money Saving Mom, one of the bloggers I’ve been following for a long time who’s helped me dive into the world of coupons, wrote a post this week about how she recently more than doubled her grocery budget and why. I so appreciated her honesty, and I have a lot of respect for the choice she made! Clinging to a level of frugality just because you always have is not the point.
When we closed on our loft on April, we set aside some of the money we had saved for a down payment that we didn’t end up using to spend on furnishing and decorating our new place. And let’s just say Frugal Laura didn’t exactly do most of the shopping. We decided we were at a stage in our lives where we wanted quality furniture, so we bought some nice stuff. There’s definitely a fair amount of Target and Ikea thrown into the mix, but the major pieces we bought were full-price and brand new. (I will say, we shopped online and used our credit cards strategically, so we did end up with a decent amount of cashback. Even Non-Frugal Laura can’t stand to leave any money on the table!)
You have to know yourself–I am not particularly crafty or handy, so buying a piece off of Craigslist that needs some love is not my speed. It would never please me because I would never get it to look how I wanted.
We are extremely fortunate that at this point my level of frugality is more of a lifestyle choice than a necessity. So by choosing to break my own rules and throw frugal to the wind, we’ve furnished our home with pieces we love and that will hopefully be around for a long, long time to come!
