Making the adjustment to living the frugal life can be hard when you’re first starting out. After years of spending frivolously, learning to make frugal choices can be downright painful at times. There will be days when you just want to throw in the towel and go back to spending your money as you please. How do you find the willpower to continue on your new path?
You should know that it’s perfectly natural for you to feel this way as you make changes to your spending habits. You can lessen your struggle, however, by making a series of small changes rather than one or two massive ones. Working your way up to a frugal lifestyle will be a much smaller shock to you and the rest of your family than trying to change overnight. Look at these subtle changes and consider how you can work them into your life.
Lessen the number of times you eat out for lunch. It might be too drastic to stop eating your lunch out of the office every day; but limiting your lunch outings to once or twice a week will allow you to see significant savings without totally changing your regular routine.
Use generic products when you won’t notice the difference. Generic toilet paper, sugar, and bread are easy to switch to because they’re just not that different from the name brand products. However, if you love Kraft’s macaroni and cheese, use coupons or sales to economically purchase this cheesy dinner favorite.
Exercise your shopping muscle in more thrifty settings. If you traditionally spend your Saturdays shopping, you may miss your weekly outing. Instead of cutting shopping out of your life entirely, you can visit garage sales or flea markets. You’ll enjoy the hunt for a great bargain and save money at the same time.
Once you’ve adjusted to these changes in your spending habits, you’re ready to start looking for new ways to explore the frugal life. Before long, you’ll be ready to create your own budget, build a savings account, and work your way out of debt.
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When I was getting my blog The Lean Green Family (formerly Suddenly Frugal) off the ground last year, along with our newly frugal lifestyle, one of the first, small changes that I made was deciding NOT to buy books anymore. It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to read–I’m a writer, for Pete’s sake. Words are my living. It’s just that I was going to start using a reader’s best free resource–the public library. In flush years I’d simply gotten out of the habit of borrowing books from the library, because it was “easier” to just buy them. Once, though, I added up how many hundreds of dollars I was spending on books each year, and my library card became my new best friend.
Here’s a post about our new frugal behavior when it comes to the library:
http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com/2007/06/library-fines-and-lessons-learned.html
Buying stuffs at flea markets is certainly very cheap. I agree that transitioning to frugal living is difficult. However, the amount of money saved is certainly enough motivation for me to pursue this virtue.
Sam
Fix My Personal Finance
http://fixmypersonalfinance.com/