Hello. My name is Ida and I am a frugal fraud. There. I said it.
When our family was going through its tightest financial times, I was a cost cutting, value adding, coupon clipping, laundry detergent making (ok so I still do this!) picture of frugality. I swore that our family would be that way through thick and thin. We were going to keep from falling into the trap of lifestyle inflation once our financial picture got rosier. I was wrong.
I slowed way down on couponing and deal shopping. We stopped giving every dollar a job and let it start to trickle out of our fingers, untracked and unaccounted for. We allowed ourselves to justify unplanned spending $10 here… $20 there. We started allowing excuses for unplanned dining out to creep back into our lives… too hot, too tired, too, busy.
Yesterday, I got the estimated bill for my oldest daughter’s first semester of college. After scholarship and student loan offerings, the gap between what is paid and what I have to cover is pretty huge.
The jolt that came from this made me immediately evaluate every dollar I’ve spent in the last several months and I didn’t like what I saw. So, our family is getting back to living on a budget. I’ll be listening to my CDs of Financial Peace University and going through the workbook again.
It’s time to stop Justifying away our money and start making it work as hard for us as we work for it.
Ready. Set. Take Two!
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So glad to know I’m not the only one who slipped into bad habits way too easily. We’ve been working on tightening it up again too as we have a few house projects we would like to do but refuse to go into debt over them.