Ways That We Save Money & Live Frugally – Part 1

This will be a long post, which is why it will be several parts. 🙂

I was raised by a frugal family, my parents have been missionaries since I was 5. Grant learned a lot of frugal principles from his Grandma. We have never done Dave Ramsey or anything like that, but thankfully we’ve always had a pretty good sense about living within our means (which is really the most important thing to remember!)

*Housing – We bought our first house about 10 months after we were married (we lived in TX when we got married, but knew we weren’t going to be there long term). We were 20 & 23. We bought the biggest house we could find for the most square footage.

It was not the nicest house, but we were able to do a lot of renovations & it was a perfect starter home. We made double payments whenever we had extra money (those go straight to the principal!) and paid the house off within about 6-7 years! I think this is a huge trap young people fall into, is they might live in a nice house growing up & think they should have that right away.

Once we had our first house paid off, we were able to save up & buy a nicer, bigger house. People often mistakenly think we are very wealthy because we now live in a very nice house. Not at all! We put our life savings into this house, including cashing out Grant’s UPS pension. We lived on very little for many years to be able to make it happen. But it was important to us, so we made it happen.

*Vehicles – We have almost always paid cash for our vehicles. We buy them used & save a lot. Our van is a 2004 & still running well. Our other 2 vehicles that we’ve bought in the past 4 years are a 2006 & a 2008…they both had about 200,000 miles on them, but we took them to a Midas or something like that & had them checked out before buying them (dealerships allow this, just ask!), so we knew if they needed any work & that also gives you some power to negotiate.

*Furniture – We have never spent a ton of money on furniture. We bought a set of recliners new in 2009 & still use them every single day. About 18 months ago we bought our first NEW couches. We have always bought new mattresses! (Right after we were married I was working with another newlywed & she was talking about how they had bought furniture on payment plans with interest, their cars were on payment plans with high interest rates….& they barely had anything left to live on, for food, etc… We definitely didn’t ever want to be like that!)

*If we don’t have the money to buy something, we don’t buy it! If it’s important or necessary, we’ll save up for it, or we just don’t “need” it!

Updated to add: You can now read Part 2 Here…

And Part 3 here…

Part 4

Part 5 – Conclusion