Frugal Tuesday: Happy Hour Date Night

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Elizabeth Vega

Date Night isn’t just for married couples: BFF’s, creative partners, parents and children… just about any relationship can benefit from regularly scheduled fun time. I’ve got some friends that work non-traditional schedules that have had a standing coffee date on Fridays at noon for years. Around here, we try and shake off the work-week (and school-week) and reconnect with each other on Friday nights, before plunging into a weekend that may be filled with larger group activities, household chores, and homework.

When we can, we like to make it out early enough to catch a good Happy Hour somewhere… and in Austin, TX that’s not hard to do! Plenty of restaurants around here serve pared-down (but no less delicious) Happy Hour menus, and with careful selection, we can generally make a meal out of the offerings. Happy Hours also give us an opportunity to try new higher-end restaurants without the full commitment of dropping a day’s pay on a meal we might not enjoy!

You don’t have to drink alcohol to enjoy the food specials offered at local bars and restaurants, either. And other places like coffee shops and movie theatres have picked up on the concept with two-for-one afternoon coffees or twilight pricing at late afternoon movie times.

Whatever you’re into, consider going out before the sun goes down to spend time with someone you enjoy… when you can have all the fun for much less money!

Frugal Tuesday: Shred It!

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Elizabeth Vega

Paperwork is part of #adulting. Around this time of year, many of us find ourselves reviewing files, statements and receipts in preparation for tax time. Our organizing efforts are often accompanied by the discovery of papers we no longer need. If those papers contain private information such as social security numbers, account balances, medical information or other identifying data, there’s always the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands and being used to steal your identity.

If you’ve got a shredder of your own, the solution is easy enough: sit down and get shredding! Bonus points if you have a child old enough to operate the device safely… Kids love shredding!

But if you don’t have the space or money to get a device of your own, or if you find you have way more papers to dispose of than you have time to do yourself, try doing an Internet search for “Community Shred” in your city for the current year. Many communities and shredding companies offer events allowing you to drive through and drop off your boxes of paperwork which will be shredded and recycled, boxes and all, for free or for very little money. If you’re in Austin, the next community shred event will be May 14, 2016 at the Austin Community College Highland Campus.

And who knows? Maybe when you’re finished with your shredding project, you can finally park your car in the garage, let go of your rented storage space, or rent out that extra bedroom!

Frugal Tuesday: Don’t Shave!

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Elizabeth Vega

Beards are big right now! And they have been for a few years: Back in 2013, Business Insider reported a 10% drop in Schick razor sales, and my guess is that sales have continued to decline.

A few months ago, Mr. Vega found himself mixed up with a group of guys from the Austin Facial Hair Club, and because we become who we spend time with, it wasn’t long before my husband ditched his razor, too. He joined a competition called the Six Month Sprint, wherein a bunch of guys shaved on the same day last August, took “before” photos, and pledged to meet up again at the Come and Shave It event in February to compare facial hair. Sound strange? Maybe it is a little, but they’re good people who spend a fair amount of time involved in philanthropic activities, as well. And there’s no denying they have a shared interest!

People sometimes ask me whether his beard bothers me, but I confess that every time I look at my husband’s face, I see money! All the money we aren’t spending on razors, or shaving cream, or aftershave… and because he swears that the only way to get a good shave is at the end of a long, hot shower (“to soften the whiskers!”), we’ve seen savings in our water bill, as well. He does use a lovely-smelling beard oil, but that doesn’t cost nearly as much as all the acoutrement of shaving did. And whether my husband is clean-shaven has no bearing on how much I like kissing him!

Beards may keep men (and the women who live with them) healthier, too! Just last week, BBC News reported on a study in which

The beardless group were more than three times as likely to be harbouring a species known as methicillin-resistant staph aureus on their freshly shaven cheeks. MRSA is a particularly common and troublesome source of hospital-acquired infections because it is resistant to so many of our current antibiotics.

Far from living up to the stereotype of being dirty, it appears that mens’ beards may contain a microbe that actively fights viral infections!

Giving up shaving isn’t for everyone, but if you’ve been thinking of giving it a try, you might end up saving some money… and staying healthier, too!

Frugal Tuesday: Find the Free Fun!

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Happy Tuesday, and Happy Almost-New Year!

We had family visiting us over the holidays, and so we got to walk the fine line between being generous hosts, and maintaining our budget. We’re fortunate to live in a city that actually has a website called Free Fun in Austin, but most cities have plenty of low- or no-cost activities available.

This week, we toured the Capitol of Texas, checked out the decorated trees on Highway 360, posed for pictures in front of a few of Austin’s fantastic murals, and took a drive down to San Antonio to visit the Alamo and have dinner at their beautiful River Walk.

Restaurants, guided tours and theme parks are lots of fun, but so many museums and attractions that don’t cost anything. Do a search for “Free Fun” and your city name, and what you find just might surprise you!

Frugal Tuesday: Check Your City’s Webpage

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Many cities and utility companies have money-saving programs that residents are unaware of. In Los Angeles, we were able to find free mulch and compost, free large-item pickup tags, discounted worm composting bins (in exchange for attending a 2-hour class). Here in Austin, discounts on composters are also offered, as well as free paint, mixed from people’s hazardous-waste drop-offs! We have taken advantage of numerous opportunities for rebates offered through our local electric company, and just this past weekend, we got a couple of free shade trees for our Little Hippie House through an energy-company partnering with TreeFolks.

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Take a few minutes to browse around and see what your city or utility company might be offering that you can use… you may be surprised by what you find!

Frugal Tuesday: Create Less Trash

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Our new, smaller trash can was delivered today. After the initial mess of moving in calmed down, we noticed that we weren’t filling up the city-provided can that was here when we bought the house. If we forgot to take it out to the curb for a week– or even two– it was no big deal. We’re fortunate to live in a city that provide curbside recycling and even composting, and we also make an effort to buy used, and buy items with less (or at least recyclable) packaging. While we’re far from perfect, we think our new 24-gallon can will accommodate our landfill trash needs perfectly. The best part? Making the switch to a smaller can will save us about $8/month on our trash pickup bill, as compared with the 64-gallon can we had before. I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do with $96 a year than spend it on garbage. Plus, all the coolest neighbors on our block have the smallest can… peer pressure works, y’all!

If you are living in an apartment, or somewhere you don’t pay for trash pickup, focusing on generating less landfill trash might not seem like a money-saving activity, but it still is. You might be able to save your bottles and cans to recycle for return for cash. You might try starting a worm composting bin on your patio or balcony, which is an easy way to turn your daily food scraps into nutrient-rich compost that your potted plants will love. Your efforts at reducing your trash production may find you buying from the bulk bins and farmers markets, buying used, or going for out-of-the-box floor models at deep discounts. You probably already shop at stores that gives you a nickel or a dime off your grocery bill when you bring your own bags. The more lightly we can live on the planet, the more money we can keep in our pockets!

How We Became Average Americans (And What We’re Doing to Stop It!)

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Last year, Mr. Vega and I were living in a 486-square-foot apartment in a not-so-perfect neighborhood tucked into the vast urban sprawl of Los Angeles. We had a thriving container garden on our balcony, and we supplemented the soil with compost created by a colony of red wriggler worms that also lived in a container on our balcony and fed on our fruit and vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. Our meals were all organic and made-from-scratch, often in a slow-cooker, and supplemented with green vegetable juice fresh-made daily. We kept a batch of kombucha brewing on a kitchen counter, a small bottle of organic vanilla beans and bourbon (otherwise known as “vanilla extract”) in a cupboard, and a bigger bottle of cherries, sugar and bourbon (otherwise known as “cherry bounce…” if you haven’t tried it, you might want to!) under the kitchen sink. Our refrigerator was a smaller apartment-sized unit, and we liked it that way, because it was harder to overlook what we had put in there and let it go to waste. We did our laundry twice a month, two loads at a time in our building’s communal laundry room, and hung about half of that to dry on a rack out on the balcony.

We were weird.

We seemed like perfect candidates to move to Austin, Texas… the city’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” after all! Housing prices in Los Angeles were proving pretty unforgiving, and we had our hearts set on homeownership, so we packed up a U-Haul and headed eastward, towing one car and shipping another. We had come out a month earlier and secured jobs and an apartment, but because we didn’t know the area, we chose an apartment in a more expensive part of town than our old place in L.A. This one came with a much smaller balcony, and we moved in mid-summer, too late to start a garden. It also has an in-unit washer and dryer, which came in handy, as we weren’t used to the longer drying times required for hanging laundry in the humid air of central Texas. We also weren’t prepared for how we might have to adjust our home-fermenting efforts: my first batch of kombucha grew a healthy layer of mold, and I haven’t found the motivation to try again. Although our apartment in Austin has 50% more square footage than our last place, the storage options are not well-designed, and so the kitchen is much less functional. And we still haven’t learned how to cook on an electric stovetop without burning things!

After a lifetime spent working freelance and part-time jobs, I took full-time work about six months ago, in addition to keeping a couple of my part-time gigs, so that we could save for the house we came here to buy. While I’m glad I did, I now find myself without the time or energy to shop, prep and cook like I used to. Week after week, we found ourselves letting our fresh food languish in the standard size fridge while we stopped for takeout or reached for convenience foods, and without a compost bin, 100% of our food waste has been headed to the landfill. We decided to fill our freezer with some Trader Joe’s frozen options, just to get us through the transition… not ideal, but healthier and less expensive than takeout, or most of the big-name convenience foods. After Mr. Vega sustained a sports injury that makes it difficult for him to walk without pain, even the trek to our closest Trader Joes was proving difficult to fit into my busy schedule, and I found myself shopping at the chain grocery store nearest my workplace, buying and consuming the very products that we’ve avoided so diligently for the past few years. There’s a bit of a vicious cycle going on here: our busier schedules and poorer nutrition means that we have less energy to shop for and cook the healthy foods that would give us, well, more energy! But at the end of a typical 9-hour workday, all we really want is to eat something that we don’t have to cook, lie on the couch and watch TV. And we’ve gained weight. Like most of America, we are now overworked, overweight, malnourished, and trying to function in a state of near-constant fatigue.

Our expenses have gone up, too. Living in a “safer” neighborhood in Austin costs us more in rent than our dodgy-but-familiar part of Los Angeles. The landlord-tenant laws are different here, so our rent is about to go up $200-$400 (the amount would depend on the length of the lease we sign). And our incomes decreased considerably when we left the West coast. We’re fortunate to still be earning enough to give us some margin, even with our current spendy lifestyle, but we’re keenly aware that adding children to our family, needing to care for aging parents, or experiencing a health crisis of our own would change the balance considerably. From where we sit, it’s very easy to understand how some “low monthly payments” for anything that makes life easier would start to look pretty good to a lot of people right about now.

Now we’re average.

What’s keeping us going is the knowledge that our situation is temporary: We’re currently in escrow on our first home. It’s a two-bedroom house, not much bigger than our current one-bedroom apartment, and we’ve got a healthy down payment so our monthly payments will be about the same as our rent. It’s got a couple of fruit trees in the front, a big backyard for gardening, a good-sized kitchen pantry, and a covered deck where we can hang our laundry but still have it protected from summer showers and the grackles that are ubiquitous here. There’s also a gas stove, more counter space and the opportunity to buy whatever size refrigerator we like. If all goes well, in a few months we’ll be collecting rainwater, composting, eating home-grown vegetables again, and playing host to bees, bats and butterflies. We’ll feel more comfortable inviting friends over for dinner and game nights, because there is ample street parking and zero chance of upstairs neighbors complaining about the noise we make when the conversation gets boisterous at our dining table. It will take some effort to keep our tired bodies moving after we come home from a full day’s work, but I think we’ll be able to do it, because we know from experience the good financial and physical health that any amount of urban homesteading can bring. And loathe as I am to do it, because I’ve come to love the people I work with, once we’re settled and have made a few improvements to the house I’ll be able to leave my part-time job and keep my workweek down to a more manageable five days a week instead of six.

We are not wealthy people, but we have had the luxury of working less-than-full-time, or at least of keeping flexible hours, for most of our working lives. Our year of living like “average” Americans has brought me a lot of compassion for people with fewer options. I now have answers to some of the questions in my head that start with “Why don’t they just…?” This experience has taught me that “they” probably don’t exercise the options I’m thinking of because “they” are exhausted and feeling unwell, and there isn’t always someone else to pick up the slack. I’ve learned that an unexpectedly busy week means that fresh fruits, vegetables, and even meats are likely to go unprepared and uneaten, so it’s easier to just not buy them in the first place. I’ve discovered that something as simple as a poor apartment design can have a big effect on a family’s ability to maintain healthy habits. I can see how a weeklong disruption in a steady income could throw off a working parent’s finances in ways that, if you throw in a few late fees and re-connection charges, could take years to recover from.

Living in this country, in this economic climate, is a real struggle for the average American these days. Working flexible schedules, growing and cooking your own food, staying out of debt, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance can go a long way toward making life easier, but those choices aren’t available for everyone. And they certainly aren’t options that I’ll ever take for granted again.

Have you been able to stay out of the “average” American cycle of work-spend-work? What choices have you made to accomplish that?

Welcome, Get Rich Slowly Readers!

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Years ago, during a pretty bleak time in my life, I happened across an article by Donna Freedman called “Surviving (and Thriving) on $12,000 a Year,” in which she outlined some of the ways in which she intended to not only get through the lean times she was facing, but to do it with grace, dignity, and even joy.

I wanted what she had.

I returned to that piece many times over the next few years, and continued to read everything she published that I could find. I followed along as she charted new-to-her territory as a midlife college student, as she healed her finances and expanded her career… I tried many of the money-saving tactics she wrote about and even began to do a little writing of my own about how things were going. I wrote about what it was like for me to begin that process– and begin again— here.

Nearly a decade after Donna’s words first illuminated a screen in my dark little studio apartment, I find myself sharing a life and a name with a man named “Vega,” who joined me on a journey to becoming debt-free, amassing a fully-funded Emergency Fund, and now, saving to buy our first home. Because we’re becoming financially literate a little “later” in life, we acknowledged that homeownership would be more likely for us if we left our native Los Angeles and struck out for parts unknown. Unknown to us, anyway: Austin, Texas is one of the fastest growing cities in America, and that trend shows no sign of slowing any time soon! You can read more about how we came to our decision here.

We’re learning our way around our new home town, working as hard as we can to make sure our “starter home” isn’t a retirement home, and trying to have as much fun as we can in the process without delaying our dreams.

Mr. Vega and I finally got to meet Donna in person last summer when she visited Austin on a short trip. We had only been here a couple of weeks ourselves, but I was happy to spend a little time talking with her over breakfast tacos in the Central Texas summer heat, and when she asked if I was writing anything, I mentioned this little blog that was only a couple of months old and was still finding its voice. It still is. But she took a look, and it was this post that inspired her recent article over at Get Rich Slowly.

If I could stumble across someone else’s blog and be inspired to make deep and lasting change in my life, then anyone can do it. And if some of the work Mr. Vega and I are doing inspires even one person to start doing it for themselves, then something wonderful is happening. Because if we can free ourselves from the burden of debt that has become the norm in our society, who knows what else we can do to alleviate the poverty and financial stress that keeps some of our best and brightest women and men from achieving their full potential?

That may sound pretty lofty, but every paradigm shift the world has ever known has started with just one person thinking quietly to themself: “What if I could really do this?” The idea of personal financial responsibility and freedom didn’t start with me, or with Donna Freedman, or with any of the other wonderful bloggers who have been brave enough to share their experiences with the public. But the most important thing is that the ideas don’t end with us, either.

Thank you for visiting, and I hope you’ll stick around and share some of your own thoughts in the comments. One person, one decision at a time, can change the world. But none of us has to do any of it alone. And the best part of all? We can have a hell of a good time doing it!

More Than Money (Hidden Emergency Fund Ideas)

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Elizabeth Vega

Last week, we got word from my sister-in-law that my husband’s mother had taken ill, and needed to be hospitalized. She’s home now, and on the mend, thank goodness, but we were naturally on high alert, preparing for the possibility of traveling the thousand miles that separate us from her. We’ve got a decent number of airline miles that we’ve accumulated for use in the event of an emergency requiring last-minute travel in the continental United States (we’d have to use our Emergency Fund to get to our loved ones in Hawaii, if the need arose), and that got us thinking about what other non-cash resources could get us through an emergency or hard times.

Years ago, I read an article by personal finance writer Liz Weston called “The Emergency Fund You can Eat.” In it, she wrote of maintaining a fully stocked pantry and kitchen as a first-line defense in the event of a financial crisis. Picking up an extra item or two with each visit to the grocery store may be easier for some people than trying to pile up a month’s or more worth of cash, but might ultimately yield the same results: if the money stops coming in for a time, a person or family wouldn’t go hungry while they sorted out their next steps. Bonus points for keeping a garden, no matter how small. This particular strategy has come in handy for us countless times: when we’ve been too sick (or too busy!) to get to the grocery store, during the gap between starting a new job and receiving our first pay, and since we moved to Austin, during the occasional Severe Weather Alert, when it’s safest to stay off the roads.

Savings can take on many forms, and one of the ways we’re ready for emergencies is that we’ve saved up some of our paid sick days and vacation time at work. Well, Mr. Vega has, anyway… Being new at my full-time job, I have yet to accumulate much paid time off, but it’s my intention to get and keep a couple of weeks’ worth banked to use if an emergency should arise. Not everyone has this option at work, but some places will let you swap shifts or cover for each other. Helping co-workers out when you are able can also act as a sort of Rainy Day Fund: even if it won’t replace your lost income, having people willing to cover for you can save your job when you have to miss work.

To that end, maintaining good health is another crucial component of a cashless Emergency Fund. Cooking up some of that healthy pantry and garden food, staying hydrated, sleeping well, and getting regular exercise can not only prevent missed work days and lower medical expenses, but it can also provide the ability to physically respond to crisis. It’s easier to handle the loss of a car for a person who is in good enough shape to ride a bike to work, or walk to and from a bus stop. Someone who finds themselves unable to afford their rent is also likely unable to hire movers; having spent some time slinging weights around will make a DIY move much less painful. And healthy bodies stand a better chance of thriving should the need arise to care for an ailing loved one, or to take a second job to make ends meet.

Sometimes it is nice to be able to rely on plastic when times get tough, and that’s when we reach into our wallets for our library cards. I went a year without internet service when I was paying off debt, with the help of free library wi-fi. When I was finished with my work, I’d head over to the easy chairs and spend a little time enjoying current issues of magazines that would have cost me $5 each to buy. I’d leave with an armful of borrowed books, CDs and DVDs that provided a sense of abundance in addition to the information and entertainment I got from them. Most big-city libraries also provide classes in financial and computer literacy, job search help, storytimes for children (it’s not child care, but just letting someone else read to the kids for half an hour can be a real sanity-saver for stressed-out parents), movie screenings (sometimes with popcorn!), and here in Austin, the public libraries even host monthly Adult Craft Nights! And all of it is free.

Finding money to deposit into an Emergency Fund is difficult, and even when we have the money, it’s not always pleasant. But investing in supportive relationships is a fun way to create a strong safety net for ourselves. Healthy friendships and familial relationships lessen the risk of depression and reduce the length of unemployment. If we remember to stay in touch with and enjoy the people we love when things are going well, then in hard times, those same friends and family will be there so to help each other move, provide care and companionship during illness or after an injury, or even prevent homelessness. While none of us like to imagine it, we wouldn’t hesitate to do the same for them, and it’s important to remember that accepting and receiving help when we need it also provides the giver with a sense of meaning and importance in their own lives. And being part of a robust social network makes us more resilient, so our difficulties are likely to pass more quickly than if we were trying to handle them all alone.

Getting some money in the bank to rely on in an emergency is ideal, but there are also plenty of other ways to prepare for crisis ahead of time. What are some of the ways you’ve found to be ready for whatever life throws at you?

How to Start Living Below Your Means

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Elizabeth Vega

I’m sick today. If I didn’t speak for a living, I could probably still go to work, but I’ve got laryngitis, so I am out of commission. Trouble is, as an hourly employee and freelancer, “no work” means “no pay.” The good news is, Mr. Vega and I have the great good fortune of a fully funded (3-6 months of living expenses) emergency fund, and have gotten the hang of living below our means, so we probably won’t need to dip into savings to cover a few days of lost work.

But it wasn’t always like this. Most of my work has come without paid sick time or vacation days, and before I learned to live modestly, even one sick day could create a financial crisis. Never mind “paycheck-to-paycheck,” I lived “credit card bill-to-credit card bill” for a decade, and viewed due dates as mere suggestions, racking up late fees and ruining my credit, while still getting $100 spa treatments on a regular basis. If I heard the suggestion during those years to live within or below my means, it didn’t register, because I wouldn’t have even known where to start.

It’s been eight years since I found myself living in a small, sad apartment, staring at thousands of dollars in credit card and tax debt, alongside statements for hefty paychecks, wondering how I could have earned such a high hourly rate for so long and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, actually, because I had a negative net worth!

Something happened in that lonely apartment, and before I knew it, I was canceling credit cards, filing amended tax returns in search of deductions that had been overlooked in my sloppy record-keeping, and trying out slow-cooker recipes to lower my food costs. I ignored my health and my relationships in order to work as much as I possibly could to get the debt paid. My intense focus got me debt-free within a year, but two years after that, I found myself with a $6,000 credit card bill, and a $20,000 car loan. I had learned how to pay off debt, but not how to avoid it in the first place. I hadn’t learned to budget, and I not learned to live below my means.

My first attempts at budgeting failed miserably, because I based them on templates that had little to do with my actual spending habits. As a single woman living in Los Angeles, I spent more than the national average on rent and transportation, but nothing on child care. Grocery expenses were low, restaurant spending was high, and visits to the hair salon were (and still are) non-negotiable. I came to understand that each of us is unique, and our earning, spending and savings will reflect that. What’s more, even one’s own budget will not remain a perfect fit year in and year out, or from one month to the next. Life changes quickly, and we have to change with it. I learned that if you’re ever going to get a handle on this money thing, you have to write down everything you spend. This is a requirement for success, but I struggled with it terribly until I discovered Mint (with whom I am not affiliated, and from whom I have received no compensation), which made it easy for me to see where the money was coming from and where it was going, so that I could begin to make changes based on what was actually happening.

With the whole ugly truth laid out in front of me, the first thing I did was to stop the most obvious money leaks. These are the areas where economizing is relatively painless: I started buying six-packs of soda at the grocery store and taking drinks to work instead of dropping $1.50 a day into the vending machine. I’d drive around the block looking for street parking instead of mindlessly pulling into the pay lot. My lifestyle didn’t change much, and I was still spending too much money, but I was beginning to wake up to the possibility of doing things differently. Things got much more refined later, but at this early stage, every time I didn’t super-size my order was a win for me.

After I got the hang of easier things, I began to get creative with the less-obvious opportunities for savings. I scoured my auto insurance policy for coverage I didn’t need, checked that my cell phone plan wasn’t more than I needed, and scheduled coffee dates with friends instead of dinners out. It became a game for me, and no savings was too small: the double-loader washing laundromat machine that cost a quarter less than two separate loads, the ten-cent savings at the coffee shop for bringing your own cup (later, of course, I switched to brewing my own coffee), the grocery store that offered a nickel credit for bringing your own bag…. I began to enjoy finding some sort of savings everywhere I went. After all, pennies add up to dollars, eventually.

Another major step in my financial awakening was beginning to declutter. I thought selling some of my no-longer-used things might be a good way to create more space in my home and in my budget. It was quite a shock to learn that I couldn’t expect to receive even half of what I had paid for most things, even if they had never been used! The exercise of decluttering and downsizing my possessions made me keenly aware of the purchases I made going forward. I have since cultivated a practice of buying less, buying for life when I can, and doing my level best to avoid retail prices everywhere else.

When I had just about reached the limits of minimizing my expenses within the life I was living, it became time for me to make a big move. For me, this first meant cutting cable and killing my TV, and later, moving in with a roommate to reduce my rent by $400 a month. And while it seems counterintuitive to not have begun with these things, baby-stepping my way up the ladder of frugality allowed me to garner small wins and develop an experiential conviction that larger sacrifices would be worth the effort. And they definitely were.

With my expenses cut as deeply as I could manage, my next task was to learn to earn more, which was by far the riskiest thing I did, as it involved working less, and taking a few chances with my schedule of part-time jobs and freelance work. But because I had finally paid off all my debt (again!), and brought my expenses more in line with my earnings, I could afford the gamble. The graphs and trends on Mint helped me realize that the job I deemed most stable, but that also caused me the most stress, accounted for only 10% of my annual income. With some trepidation, I left that job and increased my availability with the employer who was less stable, but paid much more. As last-minute freelance assignments come with a 20% premium, I held off on booking lower-paying work in advance, in the hopes that the higher-paying, same-day assignments would be plentiful enough to meet my needs. And I spoke up: when a new manager came on board at the freelance agency, I told him honestly that although the agency was one of my favorite employers, I frequently declined work there in favor of higher-paying jobs. Within the month, I was offered a rate commensurate with what I earned elsewhere. By choosing my assignments carefully, and giving highest priority to the highest-paying jobs, I was able to increase my income and reduce my workload.

Rinse and Repeat. By the time I had found so many ways to reduce my daily expenses, had brought down a few of the big ones, and learned to make more money in less time, life had changed enough that going back to the beginning seemed like a good idea. I had met and married my husband, and we began budgeting together early on in our dating relationship. “My goals” had been modified and expanded to become “Our goals,” which included saving for a house, and while the household income had doubled, regular expenses had not (two may not live quite as cheaply as one, but happily, the cost of running a household doesn’t double when its occupancy does). Eating a nearly meat- and alcohol-free diet didn’t work so well for my husband, so grocery expenses were higher, but cooking and eating at home was more fun with a companion, and so the restaurant budget shrank. And since we moved from California to Texas, we’re spending less on gasoline, but more on mosquito repellant!

Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned on the path to living below our means is that you’ve got to have fun doing it. Brown-bagging my lunch means I get to eat healthier, more interesting meals every day, and still have enough money to get my hair done every other month, without having a minor panic attack when it comes time to pay. Losing my loyalty to name-brand products made by companies who aren’t concerned with my well-being means that I can fill our fridge without draining our bank accounts. Finding free fun on weekends lets us enjoy life while saving for a house. And taking a few calculated risks in order to earn more money allows me to stay home and write when I’m sick without fear that the lights will get turned off next month because of it.

Is living within or below your means important to you? What changes have you made, or would you consider making, to do it?