My husband and I are committed to learning new things. It’s a goal of ours to consistently make ourselves beginners in different capacities. Putting ourselves in a beginner mindset enables us to keep our brains limber, opens us up to creativity and new experiences, keeps us humble and models lifelong learning for our kids.

It has been the catalyst for a number of conversations with our girls around the facts that you don’t get things right the first time, you have to work hard and be persistent and that it’s ok to make mistakes. Also, that you’re never too old to learn something new!

In the past few years, we’ve learned how to:

• Downhill ski
• Use a chainsaw
• Paddle board
• Grow and preserve fruits and vegetables
• Raise chickens
• Drive the tractor, plow the driveway, fell and skid trees for firewood and much more (this being Nate, not me)
• Sing solos at church (me)
• Do a ton of home and farm repairs, maintenance and upgrades (Nate)

And now, Nate has decided to learn how to play the guitar!

Continue reading A Used Guitar And Other April 2023 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

The kids had the last week of February/first week of March off school, so we went on a few local family day trips!

First up: Skiing at Burke Mountain

We’d never been to this ski area before and figured vacation week was the perfect time to try it out. The mountain has a “Wicked Wednesdays” special where it’s $45 for three day passes!!!! This is a phenomenal deal and one we plan to take advantage of next year too. Since ages 5 and under ski for free, we only had to pay $45 for a full day of skiing for all four of us!

With all the money we saved on lift tickets, we treated the girls to lunch at the ski lodge restaurant, which I have to say was better food with more reasonable prices than I expected. It was really fun to ski in/ski out of the restaurant and the girls were thrilled.

Continue reading A Museum Visit And Other March 2023 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

I promise I will talk about what we spent last month in a moment, but first I want to tell you that you can now…

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Call with Me!

If you’ve been thinking about hiring me to do a financial plan for you, if you’re curious about how my consultation process works or whether or not I can answer your questions… you can now grab 15 minutes on my calendar for free! I want folks to feel confident that I can help them with their money and, I’ve found a 15-minute chat is an easy (and fun!) way for you to pick my brain on what exactly I can do for you and your monies.

Why do I offer financial consultations? Because money is terrifying for a lot of people and many folks don’t know where to start.

Continue reading Littlewoods’ Birthday And Other February 2023 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

My $5 yard sale bread machine got upgraded to a $40.91 yard sale bread machine with the replacement of its dough blades. Who doesn’t love starting the new year with new dough blades?! These small, blade-like objects snap into the base of the bread machine’s basket to perform the crucial kneading step in the bread making process. I am thrilled to outsource kneading to these blades and they tirelessly execute their task without so much as a squeak of complaint (cannot say the same about the children of the house to whom I also attempt to outsource… mixed results; will report back in 10 years).

I picked up our Zojirushi bread machine at a yard sale about 3.5 years ago and we’ve made what I estimate to be ~200 loaves of whole wheat sandwich bread since its arrival. After mixing and kneading lo those many loaves, the original dough blades wore down and lost their non-stick coating, causing large clumps of bread to adhere to the blades and not the loaf.

Continue reading Replacement Dough Blades And Other January 2023 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

Ahhh decadent December! Filled with food, wine, life-sized penguin stuffies and dog booties. December always promises to be a high-spend month, but that doesn’t have to spell crisis. If you plan for expensive months, if you calculate what you spend on something like Christmas and save up over the course of a year, you can conclude a month like December with satisfaction as opposed to regret. The goal in all of this–all of this money awareness and wise financial management–isn’t to NEVER spend money.

The goal (in my opinion, anyway) is to spend money:

1. In alignment with your values and on what matters most to you
2. In a planned, proactive way as opposed to an impulsive, reactive way
3. To enhance happiness, not to create stress
4. Only on things you can actually afford

How you articulate those four pillars of spending is up to you, and for me?

Continue reading Walkie Talkies And Other December 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

November is always a month of celebrations in our family! We hosted Thanksgiving for what we think is the 10th year–although there were a few years off for Covid–and Kidwoods turned seven!

Our expenses are always higher in November on account of these festivities and I don’t mind at all. Having the ability to spend on things that matter deeply to me is why I’m frugal. It’s why I track my spending. It’s why I interrogate my priorities and how my spending reflects them.

It’s an illustration of values-based spending:

Save on stuff that doesn’t matter–or that you can get used for a cheaper price–to enable yourself the freedom to spend on the things that matter most.

Earlier this month I wrote about how I’ve saved thousands of dollars on my kids’ wardrobes by sourcing all of their clothing second-hand.

Continue reading Dog’s Christmas Stocking And Other November 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

We Adopted A Dog!

I’m thrilled to introduce Genevieve the dog (aka Gigi)!! Frugal Hound 2.0, Gigiwoods, G-dog McHound Face! She’s a rescue so we’re not sure of her exact age or breed, but our vet estimates she’s 6 months old and likely to be 60-70lbs (she’s currently 40lbs). We think she’s a Plott Hound/Black & Tan Coonhound cross, but again, can’t be certain. She has snuggled right into our pack and the girls are thrilled to have a dog-sister! Despite being a puppy, she’s calm, sweet, doesn’t bark and LOVES to hike. We are so happy to welcome a new dog into our family and she seems very happy to be here. Brace yourselves for a deluge of dog fotos!

OG Frugal Hound

Longtime readers will remember our first dog, Gracie, better known as the OG Frugal Hound. She was a delightful rescued greyhound who passed away in January 2018.

Continue reading A DOG! And Other October 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

Last month we took the kids on their very first vacation! To the beach! We didn’t travel during Covid and, pre-Covid, the only trips they went on were to visit family (which is also a vacation, but you know what I mean). Our dear friends have a family beach house on the New Jersey shore in Mantoloking and we drove down with them for a five-day, four-night stay. It was glorious. Magical. Perfect.

Are We There Yet?

We were kinda nervous about how the kids would do on their first ever 7+ hour drive, but it was a non-issue! I had them each pack a little car backpack for themselves and I secretly packed a duffle bag of other toys and activities, which I meted out during our potty/food stops. Not to mention SNACKS. We broke our no-eating-in-the-car rule for the trip, which was a stellar move. Littlewoods must’ve gobbled 19 granola bars on each leg of the journey and I feel zero guilt about that.

Continue reading A Beach Vacation And Other September 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

Birthday Brewery Bash!

Mr. FW celebrated his 39th birthday in August and my in-laws graciously kept our children for three days (and two nights!!!!)! We decided against traveling this year–last year we went kid-free to Cambridge, MA–and instead stay-cationed it up. When I asked my husband what kind of cake he wanted me to bake, he replied, “beer.” Excellent.

We made a reservation at Hill Farmstead (ranked the best brewery in the world) and spent his birthday lounging on their lawn, viewing the mountains and sipping beer. Perfection. We also went hiking, bought some used snow tires for the Subaru and took a day trip to Burlington, VT. Several other breweries made their way onto our itinerary: Foam, Queen City Brewing, Burlington Beer Co and Lawson’s. Vermont is truly abundant with breweries!

Other People’s Birthdays

Many people have August birthdays, it seems, including three of Kidwoods’ friends.

Continue reading Doggie Doppelgänger And Other August 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.

After nine years of pandemic isolation, we decided this would be the summer of family day trips! Our kids hadn’t been to any of the area museums or towns or restaurants or libraries due to: a) pandemic; b) being babies before the pandemic.

We’ve made up for that dearth of activity in force. Swimming, beaches, paddle boarding, museums, hiking, breweries, ice cream shops, mini summer camps–we’ve done it all! And paid for it all. Remember those cheap pandemic summer days? When no one could go anywhere or do anything? Nah!

Day Trip To Burlington, VT

Burlington, also known as the largest city in Vermont, was one of the many places our children hadn’t visited. This “metropolis” is home to a mere 220,000(ish) residents, but you must remember that our town is home to a mere 700 residents. It’s New York City as far as our woods-children are concerned.

Continue reading Family Day Trips And Other July 2022 Expenses at Frugalwoods.