Monday, March 09, 2009

Which Frugal Chick Are You?

I have started reading the happy homemaker, and besides just loving her title, I also love her posts. In this one she talks about 3 types of frugalnesss in her life:

Drastic frugality- I am not sure what this all would entail but some ideas discussed were dh biking to work, making even more items from scratch to cut grocery costs, cloth diapers, vehicle changes, growing our own food, switch to a pay as you go cell phone, cut out paper plates, napkins, paper towels, disposable wipes in addition to the things we already do.

Moderate Frugality- Basically continue on the current path with slight modifications. We are planning a Square Foot GardenLiving on Less ~ Financial Goals
this year and I hope to increase our from scratch cooking since it is something I enjoy doing already.

Frugal living for Wimps- This is how I feel about how we are living now. We made some pretty significant changes a few years back, but have stalled a bit in our progress. Even if we continued on the exact same course we could still save money, but not enough to purchase a house for cash in the next few years.


Isn't this great? I love how she divides them up. For each of us, the drastic, moderate, and wimpy might look somewhat different depending on where we are on our journey, but I can so totally relate.

20 years or so, when we first started on our frugal path, we dove right into the drastic frugal phase out of necessesity. I hung my clothes on a line to dry. We practically eliminated eating out, we rented the smallest, cheapest house we could find, we heated our house with wood--a wood burning stove. It was an intense time in our lives, getting out of debt and building our business. Then as the business grew profitable, we switched to the moderate phase, and somehow got sucked into the wimpy phase. I've always tried to do some frugal things just to make our money stretch further, but it wasn't until my husband had his accident and our life radically changed 6 years ago that I dove back into the moderate frugal phase and am now looking at the drastic phase. I'm digging out my old Tightwad newsletters I saved, I'm visiting frugal blogs, and in general, I'm just resetting my mindset to be drastically frugal.

So which frugal chick are you? Do you see yourself in one or more of the categories? I have a couple more posts in the works about what we have done to be more frugal and what we are working towards. So stay tuned!

4 comments:

Alicia The Snowflake said...

Oh I would say I am in the wimpy group. I would love to be more drastic. But our lives are just too crazy right now for me to be able to put much time and effort into it. If that makes any sense. I try but I could definitely do a lot better.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to go check out her blog!

Amazing_Grace said...

Cheap Chick would describe me best. I never buy anything for myself and I always think before I buy anything. LOL!

*carrie* said...

I'll have to check out that blog, Gail. My husband and I are both naturally frugal, but I would put us in the moderate category. I've been wanting to re-read Tightwad Gazette, which I found to be very inspiring!

Joanna Barrett said...

Love it! I'm somewhere between the moderate and drastic; always hanging out on the border of both depending on the time of the month or semester. Totaly going to check out the blog you mentioned and I'm looking forward to the next few posts you have planned!