These long-term goals ultimately drive day-to-day financial discipline. “If you can focus on the bigger picture and understand where you want to be in 10 years, 20 years, the short-term idea of implementing frugality becomes a lot easier,” Elizabeth said. They’ve also built a healthy investment portfolio. I’ve been in your shoes, overwhelmed by how to manage my money and unsure of where to start. I learned everything I could about personal finance, shared my journey through my blog and my book, and started helping other folks improve their finances too. What product or service epitomizes consumerism?

• These long-term goals ultimately drive day-to-day financial discipline.
• Mrs. Frugalwoods hasn’t bought clothes for 17 months, even though she’s five months pregnant.
• They settled in beautiful Cambridge, MA and bought a four-bedroom home that was walking distance to Harvard and MIT.
• Sara started a blog because she wanted to document a no spend challenge.
• All her posts about her hometown in Amish country, and all the frugal life tips she’s learned from her neighbors.

The “random box of junk” delivered to you each month. It’s literally stuff you don’t need that you’re paying money for every month–I’m looking at you Birch Box, Bark Box, Custom Toothpicks Box. In addition to receiving unnecessary crap, you’re paying to be marketed to–they send little samples to entice you to pay even more money for the full-sized product! You’re not even getting something useful, like for example a Bacon Box. I admit that a Bacon Box is equally useless and I’d never pay for it, but at least you’d get to eat some bacon. Our biggest goal in life is to not regret the way we spent it.

Maybe you’re ready to try saving money for the first (or 40th) time. Or maybe you just can’t get your head above water, financially, and you feel like… Hillary was an ‘overdraft four times a month’ kind of girl before discovering the magic of budgeting, setting frugal goals, and kicking debt to the curb. She also taught high school economics for six years, which helped.

Best Frugal Blogs to Actually Help You Save Money

But the more we talked, the more apparent it became that we wanted to make this move sooner—much, much sooner. Our desire to live in ways that we find personally meaningful was powerful. We now live a simpler, more creative life closer to nature, where we work together towards our future and our shared goals.

I don’t want to spend 12 hours chopping and blanching enormous stalks of chard. One of my goals in writing Frugalwoods is to build an online community of like-minded folks who value living life above spending money. We love the community that has grown here and we thank you all for sharing your personal stories with us and with each other. We took a look at our finances and realized that if we embraced extreme frugality–and maintained our decent salaries–we’d be able to make this dream a reality much sooner. After college, Mr. FW and I worked hard to advance in our careers.

The Hobbit And Other May 2023 Expenses

They made their own seltzer water for an annual savings of $470. When Elizabeth volunteered at a yoga studio in exchange for classes, the savings amounted to $3,456 a year. The couple furnished their four-bedroom house near Inman Square with used furniture and painted their kitchen cabinets themselves.

Welcome to the NEW (looking) Frugalwoods!

(The 1500′s are pizza fanatics.) We have a list of 17 questions we pose to fellow financial bloggers, and they are free to pick and choose 10 or answer all 17. Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future edition of 10 Questions. “I do think we live what we consider a luxurious frugal life,” says Mr. Frugalwoods. “We live very comfortably and have everything we want.”

Afterwards, they might opt for watching PBS or a movie from the library, since they don’t have
Netflix
and haven’t been to a movie theater in six years. “Most things people would pay someone else to do, we do ourselves,” says Mrs. Frugalwoods. They’ve conquered a lot of the typical tasks you might find in a self-sufficient household — they do all their own cooking, cleaning and home maintenance. Bola Sokunbi is the Nigerian-born powerhouse behind Clever Girl Finance. Her goal is to provide free content in the form of books, worksheets, courses, and coaches to help educate the world in personal finance.

I’m consistently running into her stuff on the internet and am always impressed. By saving as much as 80 percent of their annual income, according to Elizabeth’s book, their plan for a country life was realized. In May 2016, the Frugalwoods and their infant daughter, dubbed Babywoods, moved to Vershire, where they bought a house and 66 acres for $389,000, according to town records.

He retired early, and I left my unfulfilling job to focus on helping people like you. Let me show you how to frugalwoods make your money create the life you want. What advice would you give to a 24 year old, just out of college?

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Now, they’ve reached a higher plane of web-existence and focus equally on how to save, make, budget, invest, and overall handle money. I, too, lived near Inman Square for a while — back in the early 1980s. For accounting purposes, I probably never should’ve moved. We paid $185 a month for a big two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment. We found scrap wood in the neighborhood wasteland — since taken over by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and built a kitchen table. A money-saving strategy that worked for Mrs. Frugalwoods was giving up her Dunkin’ Donuts iced tea break at work.

Many of you have asked me to re-start my This Month On The Homestead series and to be honest, I haven’t because I feel like we’re letting you down as homesteaders! We did SO MUCH work our first few years and now, we kinda just rinse and repeat with each season. The infrastructure set-up of our first years was staggering and I’m glad it’s over with. I certainly could re-start the series and let you know how things are going, but don’t hold your collective breaths. Detailed in this old post, this was the harvest that did me in.

I also break down our expenses every single month, which you can review in our Monthly Expense Reports. We want to wake up inspired to try new things and create a life of variety. We crave adventure and part of what we disliked so much about working in offices is the lack of diversity and discovery. We’re committed to creating a life of purpose and intention. We’re striving for a life where we work hard, but on projects that are rewarding. We’re ex-urban, rookie homesteaders finding contentment (and a lot of chores) on 66 acres in rural central Vermont along with our our two young daughters.

I wanted to see if we could do it–actually provide for all of our sustenance needs (insofar as kale and chard are concerned). My writing is a narration of our successes, foibles, and lessons learned along this path to a wholly unconventional, whimsical, and purpose-filled life. All of this is about creating routines and habits.