One of the driving forces behind the birth of Frugalwoods was our desire to leave the city and buy a homestead in the woods. That happened in May 2016 and let me tell you, we had A LOT of preconceived notions about what it would be like to live rurally, some of which turned out to be true and some of which… not so much. It’s easy to gloss over the specifics when you’re dreaming about moving to the country. It becomes very much about the specifics when you lose power and water for a week in the dead of winter thanks to an ice storm. It’s those specifics–those powerful details–that have shaped our lives out here.

A gargantuan assumption was that we’d grow all of our own food.

Before so much as starting a single tomato plant, I nurtured an idyllic vision of us growing all the fruits and vegetables we could ever want each summer.

Continue reading We’ll Grow All Of Our Food! And Other Misconceptions I Had About Rural Life at Frugalwoods.

April is the ninth anniversary of Frugalwoods! Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for so long yet am still invigorated and excited to type words at you and help people with their money!!!! This is–by far–my longest tenure at a job and I’m not ready to quit or fire myself!

To celebrate, I’m going to write a series of reflections on my own writing over the past nine years. Do I agree with my old self? How have my views changed? When I started Frugalwoods on April 9, 2014, I had just turned 30, I lived in the city of Cambridge, MA, I’d been married to my husband for six years, we were both working 9-5 office jobs and we had zero kids.

A lot happened in the intervening nine years!

• I just turned 39
• This is the 718th post I’ve published on Frugalwoods
• My husband and I have two kids, ages 5 and 7
• We’ve been married for nearly 15 years
• We live on our dream homestead in the woods of Vermont
• Our former city home is now a rental property
• My husband fully retired in 2021 when we reached financial independence

I now work part-time (~23 hours/week) on Frugalwoods, which has grown to include:

• My free Uber Frugal Month email course

• The Reader Case Study series, which has featured 95 different peoples’ financial lives to date!

Continue reading Reflecting on Nine Years of Frugalwoods at Frugalwoods.

I have a hectic relationship with clothing. In my 20s and early 30s, I worshipped it. I stuffed the closets of our various rental apartments with beaded slip-on loafers I bought at an outdoor market in Strasbourg, France; a vintage bubblegum-pink stewardess dress I liberated from a Goodwill in rural Kansas; a red Banana Republic raincoat I found (with tags on) at a consignment store in Boston.

Recently, a number of readers–mostly also young (am I still young?) moms–have asked me what I wear and how I approach my relationship with clothing these days. Longtime readers will recall my three-year-long all-out ban on buying clothing. I successfully went three years without buying anything because I desperately needed a re-set. I bought clothes at thrift stores and yard sales constantly. I had enough to clothe an entire soccer team. Several teams.

I’ve only recently realized how intertwined my clothing obsession was with my previously undiagnosed depression and anxiety.

Continue reading My Ever-Evolving Relationship With My Clothes at Frugalwoods.

Knowing where your money’s at is the first step in financial planning. Before you can set goals, panic about having no money, or compliment yourself on your ability to buy a new back scratcher, you’ve got to know:

1. What you earn
2. What you spend
3. Your debts
4. Your assets
5. In other words, your overall net worth!

Lucky for us, there’s a FREE service that’ll do all of this for us. It’s called Personal Capital. I talk about it all the time. I use it all the time. Today I’ll explain why.

Everything In One Place

When folks do a Reader Case Study here on Frugalwoods, the most time consuming–and critical–aspect is compiling all their financial information. It’s basically Marie Kondo-ing your money:

• Where are those college t-shirts you received for winning beer ping pong?

Continue reading How to Know Everything About Your Money: Why I Use and Recommend Personal Capital at Frugalwoods.

It’s rare to be a beginner as an adult. As kids, “beginner” described our lives. Everything a kid does is new. They’re inexperienced and unafraid of grabbing a sweet potato and peeler for the first time ever and skimming the blade over the peel without hesitation.

But as adults, we almost never put ourselves in the position of not knowing how to do something. We drive our cars via muscle memory, we do the laundry out of habit, we’re confident in our careers and we know how to peel sweet potatoes without impaling ourselves. This makes our lives stable, secure, predictable and perhaps a tad too rote.

Earlier this year, I made myself a beginner. A complete and total beginner.

I Learned To Ski

My husband, two of our friends and I took an adult learn-to-ski class starting in early January. At the first class, I didn’t know how to put on my skis.

Continue reading How I Gave Myself the Gift of Being a Beginner at Frugalwoods.

Environmentalism, frugality, and minimalism are intertwined. They form a complementary, interconnected system that goes something like this:

Need less, buy less, use less, consume less, spend less, deplete less…. and finally, want less.

Today, I want to discuss how these three values can work in concert to save money, reduce stress, and inform choices.

Much of frugality, environmentalism, and minimalism is encapsulated by doing less. It’s more compelling to buy into expensive “solutions” engineered to deliver a facsimile of these goals, but buying your way to environmentalism (or minimalism or frugality) is nothing more than effective marketing at work.

The cycle of doing less doesn’t get much press because there’s no real profit in it (ask me how I know). The cycle of doing less doesn’t have the advantage of being flashy or even particularly Instagram-able (though I’ve tried). Nevertheless, it’s a compelling way to live.

Continue reading Environmentalism, Frugality, and Minimalism: The Triumvirate That’ll Save You Money and Simplify Your Life at Frugalwoods.

Today’s goal: Make it easy to do the right thing with your money.

The January 2020 Uber Frugal Month Group Challenge* ends today. Congratulations to everyone who participated! A major focus of this month-long challenge is enshrining healthy money habits for the longterm. It’s not good enough to do good with your money one month, you’ve got to do good with your money all the months. That’s the only route to true improvement.

Frugality can become your default and you can train yourself to do the right thing with your money. It’s about establishing habits that are easy to follow and that remove paralysis by analysis.

I live my life according to habits and routines because without them, I’d be running around the house with baby socks flying out of the laundry hamper, braiding one kid’s hair while the other kid eats peanut butter off dirty plates in the dishwasher.

Continue reading How to Create Sustainable Money Habits at Frugalwoods.

I’m ruthless about how I use my time and money. They’re both limited resources and how I deploy them dictates the type of life I lead. That doesn’t mean I never waste money and time. In fact, it was two recent failures–a $78.59 shopping spree at the co-op grocery store and a dirty upstairs bathroom–that prompted today’s reflection.

My Priorities = How I Use My Time and Money

When I analyze how I spend my money (easy to do thanks to tracking my spending with Personal Capital) and how I spend my time (harder to do, but possible through a time audit), my priorities are laid bare.

For example, saying that exercise is a priority for me right now is demonstrably false since I put no money and very little time into it. Conversely, saying that my relationship with my husband is a priority is borne out by the money we spend on date nights and the time we take to eat dinner together every night.

Continue reading How I (try to) Align My Time and Money With My Highest Priorities at Frugalwoods.

I was pregnant or breastfeeding for four years. Starting in March 2015, when I got pregnant with Kidwoods, straight through to April 2019, when I weaned a 14-month-old Littlewoods. There was a one-month hiatus in 2017 after I weaned Kidwoods and before I got pregnant with Littlewoods. Other than that, my body’s been in full-time mama territory.

Today is an exploration of how my relationship with my body–and by extension, with clothes–evolved as a result of my pregnancies and parenting. I’m learning it’s more nuanced than the fact that my hips will never go back to their original shape. The physical changes are the most obvious, but the mindset shift is the most affecting.

Body positivity, acceptance, finding a balance between vanity and neglect, breaking my clothes-buying-ban, and spending money are all wrapped up in this experience.

Four Years Of Maternity Clothes

Four and a half years ago, I was determined to cobble together a hand-me-down maternity wardrobe and baby nursery.

Continue reading How I’m Learning To Love My Body, Find A Middle Ground, And Buy Clothes Without Regret at Frugalwoods.

I have a complicated relationship with stuff. My grandfather grew up during the Great Depression and instilled in his children–my mom included–the ethos of never throwing anything away. Of reusing, of finding good deals, and of making do with what you have. These were valuable lessons for me and they form the basis of my frugal worldview. However, the dark side is that this approach can engender a scarcity mindset. It can make me feel like I can’t get rid of anything because I might need it one day and so I should hold onto it just in case.

Frugality’s Tension With Minimalism

I wrote about my overall quasi-minimalist lifestyle a few years ago in Frugal Minimalism: Do Less, Buy Less, Worry Less, Live More, which delves into the concept of guarding how I spend my time, money, and energy. Today I want to talk more granularly about the minimalism of stuff.

Continue reading How I Try To Balance Minimalism With Frugality at Frugalwoods.