I’m continuing to introduce my themes for 2019 and this next one is sometimes met with a lot of discomfort or judgement but here we go…

F is FRUGAL… and maybe a little bit about other finance stuff thrown in. I didn’t want to make the focus itself Finances because I am NOT a finance expert, we aren’t even sure what our exact financial goals for the new year are… but I AM really good at making a budget stretch… pretty dang far. (My husband and I have MFAs in Shakespeare… we are the people that pundits make jokes about…) and I HAVE gotten a lot better at numbers in recent years (Again… the MFAs in Shakespeare… words are really more our jam. I took part of my AP Calculus test in PURPLE CRAYON as a protest against math… I’ll tell that story sometime later this year…)

Anyway, the struggle is real with two kids and only one full time income in an age where costs vs. wages are not an encouraging picture. I don’t have a lot of advice on how to get rich quick (or even how to get rich slowly if you, like me, are buried under a mountain fo student loans) but I DO know that frugality- it’s not a dirty word and that I can share some ways we are living frugally. And I also think it’s important to share that FRUGAL is NOT the same as STINGY. We strongly believe that where you put your time and your money should reflect your values, so I’ll definitely be talking about GIVING as part of the way we approach finances and living frugally.

So hopefully these posts will be helpful for some of my readers and, at the very least, hopefully it won’t make y’all uncomfortable!