Frugal Lifestyle Check In Number One... and Where We Go Next

Well it has been just about two months since my family and I decided to start living a frugal lifestyle. Now I thought about checking in about my blog every month but I thought that would be redundant and not very useful of time because the reality of life is nothing happens on a perfect time schedule.

Well what do you do after you make such an announcement? Hubs and I had no idea really expect that we needed to start saving better. I heard the term frugal all the time and understand the concept but really had no idea had to put into action as sad as it sounds. So where did we go from there? Research of course!!! So I have been researching many ideas, theories, and ways in which to be frugal. I found some of these ideas to be interesting, common sense, and in some cases extreme. To say the least not all frugal ideas or lifestyle ideas are for everyone but there are enough ideas and concepts out there that anyone can find tips and areas to be frugal in.

However, with all the research we did put a couple of plans into action. One in which was the 52 week savings plan! This has been very successful and actually been very fun to do! We are currently on week 8 and having fun with saving! You can find out about the 52 weeks saving plan blog post here 52 Week Saving's Challenge .

Still sitting up on my book shelf and added Walter for protection! Picture belongs to A Bipolar Mom and Her Daily Life

We also started making plans on how we wanted to tackle this and really wanted to make an action plan. For example, Christopher realized where the one area that he wanted to explore and that was making bread vs buying bread. For our household we go through a lot of bread and making are own bread offered us a huge amount of savings on our grocery bill. That will be for another blog post.

So we decided each month to focus on applying new frugal tips and techniques to apply for our lifestyle. As I have stated before you must make small changes at a time to accomplish the larger goal in your life! Also my accomplishing the smaller goals you feel empowered to keep moving forward with the change! That is what has exactly happen for us. However, with all goals and challenges there are always high and lows and I think it is only fair that I discuss the high and lows so far that we faced with adjusting this lifestyle.

High: it was first f freeing to admit that we needed to make a change in our lifestyle! Employing some of these changes have been very neat and have been encouraging to move forward and that we are on the right path. The 52 weeks saving plan has been not fruitful but fun! We actually look forward to each Sunday for our deposit and joy when we put more than min deposit in!

Low: just as it was freeing to admit that we needed to make this change it as at the same time very scary for far we need to go to make the improvement we need. When you see this is it hard not to feel defeated and feel bad when you make a slip up (i.e. run through a drive through when you promised not to go out eat).

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: The next areas that we plan to really exploring into a new family budget, groceries, coupons, and cutting back.  We also plan on setting up no spending goals to lead up to are first no spend month!

You can find why we decided to live more frugal blog post here ( Frugal Lifestyle Announcement )