Being Frugal means different things to different people.
Some people are frugal as a way of life, lots of people are frugal out of necessity and some are frugal to enable them to free up money for other things.
We come under the third category, we save money where we can so that we have more spare money to spend on the children and to do fun things with them. I want them to have a happy childhood and whilst I’m fully aware that money certainly doesn’t bring happiness, the money that we manage to save means that we can take them on holiday, go camping, buy them treats, have family days out and do fun activities with them that we might not be able to afford otherwise. In the school holidays for example, we do lots of free or cheap activities and the money we save allows us to do some things that cost money – like a theme park.
We have a nice house, a car that gets us from A – B (most of the time) and about average debt that we’re working on reducing but for the most part we choose to spend our spare money on experiencing as much as we can with the children as a family. That’s what makes living frugally worth it to me personally.
I don’t feel like we’re going without in any way, we’re just making the best of everything that we have by doing small things like planning our meals, getting the best deals for everything and keeping an on our budget.
I think the word frugal sometimes presents people with a picture of people not living a full life or worrying about every penny that they have to spend but that genuinely isn’t the case for a lot of people and certainly isn’t for our family.
I hate the dictionary definition of frugal – it includes words like scrimping, miserly and penny-pinching! If I had my way there would be an extra definition of frugal added to the dictionary:
Frugal – saving money to spend on having fun with your family.
Everyone has their own reasons for being frugal – what’s yours?
