frugality – Frugal Things Every Day

In the ’90’s both of my sons graduated from their private high school. One son chose to go to a NYS Community College that cost $2500. a semester. He was able to commute and live at home. We paid his tuition as he went. My other son chose to attend an expensive private college doing a 5 year engineering program. He got scholarships for each of his years there. So we paid for his room and board the first year and and an additional $12,500. for his tuition every year. He also took the FAFSA government loans each year with interest that he qualified for. We had too much income for him to get any FAFSA loans without interest. His second year he moved into an apartment with other students and got a job to pay his rent. When we would visit, we would load him up on food at Sam’s Club. He did condo and apartment living until he graduated. My son who graduated from community college chose not to pursue his 4 year degree. Instead he went to work. When he was married and had a daughter, he did what Hubby did and got his degree the hard way pursuing it nights.

Hubby and I worked hard to do this for them. We took our lunches 9 out of 10 days to work. On the 10th day, we would eat from the food trucks near where we both worked. In the winter, we would go out to a reasonably priced restaurant or get takeout Chinese or pizza on one day every 2 weeks. Most of the years that I worked we carpooled. We never really splurged always keeping our eye on making sure all of their tuition was paid before we did. We cash flowed it. We had made a promise to ourselves that we would not use any of the retirement money that we saved for their tuition. Matter of fact Hubby met with people at my son’s college and told them that they had to up the amount of his yearly scholarship or he would have to go somewhere else. He explained that we were retiring soon. They knew that he had been offered 11 college scholarships from other colleges. They must have wanted him badly because they upped the yearly scholarship by quite a bit. Don’t ever be afraid to ask for more than they give your student.

In 1996, the book “The Millionaire Next Door” was first published. I bought the original. It has been published many times since. I read that book cover to cover. It was so interesting. We were well on our way to getting to be one. So we saved every dollar we could before we retired and have saved every dollar we can without going without anything since. We have given our sons and their families money many times through out the years keeping within the government yearly limits.

My eldest son moved to AZ after he married. We had been thinking about retiring for a long time and wanted to get out of the snow and go south. We had never considered AZ. But after visiting our son, we loved it there. The weather was dry and my arthritis loved it. So we had a house built there two years before we retired. I had left my job by then so I was free to fly out and stay for a few weeks at a time which I did a # of times. We had an HOA so my son and his wife made sure our property was kept up. Keeping up two homes with all of the expenses was a pain. Our home in AZ was paid in full by the time we moved there. Our home in the eastern part of NY sold quickly just before Hubby retired. That home had been paid off many years early. We sold it ourselves so there was no commission to a realtor. It was so easy that I think we would do that again.

My youngest son graduated and went to AZ to see how he liked it there and to find a job. I don’t think he liked it there because he did not look really hard for a job. He came back to NY and found a job within days. He still works there. Luckily after he came back, he met his wife. They married about 10 months after we moved to AZ.

Hubby’s retirement party was before we moved. I don’t remember if we moved the next day or a couple of days after. Atlas moved all of our things. We road tripped it there in my car because it was only a couple of years old. I was so proud that I had paid cash for it. Hubby donated his Jeep to the fire department because it had no A/C. We decided we would try to function with one car and we have been doing that for all these years that we have been retired. We had to trade my car when it started giving us problems in AZ. So we bought a minivan and paid cash for that too. We had to get rid of that after we had been here a couple of years. That is when we bought our SUV and paid cash for that. It is now almost 12 years old. We only put about 4800 miles on our car a year. We maintain it well and it is still going strong. But if we have to buy a new one, we will pay cash for that one too.

Those of you who have been following me since I started blogging pretty much know what those years were like in AZ. I started blogging 6 years after we moved there. We loved it there. We had a beautiful home and pool. We had planned on staying there forever.

My granddaughter was born there but unfortunately my son and DIL moved back to the eastern part of New York when she was almost 2 years old. I was heartbroken. Hubby and I decided we would not follow them. A couple of months later my other son called us to tell us that they were having a baby. That was it. We were moving back to NY. Even though it was the 2008 housing crisis that had made the housing market extremely bad in AZ, we decided we would sell. But first we came back to NY to find a house that we loved. We found a builder in this area and contracted to have our present home built. We looked in the Eastern part of the state also but there was no one building there at the time because of the housing crisis. We went back to AZ and called a realtor. She told us it was taking about 9 months to sell a home in their terrible market. There were houses all around us that had been for sale for months and some for a couple of years. We put it on the market and it sold in 36 hours for the price we asked for. It didn’t hurt that it had been showcased on the Phoenix News a few years before.

Then we had the problem that our house wouldn’t be ready till months after ours closed. But that didn’t deter us. We hired Atlas to move our things cross country into storage for 4 months. We road tripped it to this area and had rented a two bedroom apartment and lived there while our home was being built. That way we were here when West was born. Finally we moved into our home. But we had to wait about 2 weeks for our furniture to be delivered. So the first few days in our new home, we slept on an air mattress on the floor. Our sons came out that weekend and moved all of the furniture that we had used in the apartment so we had our bed and a living room chair. Then we went shopping in Rochester to buy furniture that we needed in this home. We had sold some furniture to the buyer in AZ. Furniture that we would not need here.

The rest you have all seen on the blog ever since.

Do we continue to save? Yes, we do. But we live well, eat well, and are happy! We don’t go without what we want but we have few wants. I am one of those people who leave things in online carts for a few days before I buy them. Most of the time, I end up emptying the cart because those items are no longer important to us.

We have reached the age that we no longer do airplane travel. I have been to Disney enough over the last few years and I am done. We will road trip it to travel and to do day trips.

Now I will let you decide if we are now the millionaire next door and or how many millions we have. I am not telling! We do have a small pension and now get Social Security but we have known that both of these things could go away at any time. So we have never relied on them. Nor should you especially if you are younger because I do not believe SS will be there for you. Over the past few generations, people are having less and less children or no children so it isn’t sustainable.

The reason I tell you all this is so that you will know that if you save all your life or even part of your life that your dreams can come true too. It is never too late to pay off credit card debt, mortgage debt, student loan debt, car loan debt, or to start saving for your retirement or any other goal.

I realize that these are tough times right now. But we have had many tough times especially during the Carter administration and many recessions all during our life. There seems to be something every decade. Don’t worry about what is going on around you. Do what is right for you and your family! Take care of your money and it will take care of you!

When I was growing up, I had a very happy life. My mother left my father when I was 3 just before my sister was born. We had no money and my grandparents took us in. My mother got a good job, her college B.A. in accounting, and I lived with my grandparents until I married.

My grandfather didn’t make much money as a shirt cutter. But he owned his home( his father was a builder), a 2 story home with two flats. Relatives always lived downstairs. Most of the money my mom made was handed over to my grandmother for rent, food, and daycare. My mom was allowed to keep enough for transportation(2 buses each way) to get to her job, food for her lunches, money so that we could all go to the lake for the summer, high school tuition( everyone in the family had graduated from this private school because it was tradition), and just a bit of spending money. My sister and I wore hand me downs from my older cousin. I got my first bike when I was 12. It was a hand me down from that same cousin. I never felt poor but I knew money was tight for the things they wanted for themselves and us. My grandmother could make a penny stretch on food like no one else that I have ever known. Every meal was portion controlled. Rarely were there snacks or soda.

This way of life got me very interested in financial things in junior high and high school. I used to take library books out of the library that today would be considered frugality books. I learned about finances in college while I studied for my accounting degree. It was the first time I ever heard about a checking account. I just soaked up everything I could learn. The two biggest things I learned was to never spend more money than you earn and to use credit the proper way. It was okay to get a mortgage for your first home but to furnish it with credit cards was a bad idea.

When I married my Hubby, he came from a different background. He lived in a very nice suburban neighborhood that was considered one of the best places to live. But as I found out over the first years of our marriage, they weren’t rich either. They did pay their home off quickly so they owned it. That was a lessen that Hubby and I loved. We paid ours off early and the last two, we paid cash.

So when we married, it was the 1960’s. Hubby owned a car with a car payment and was paying off a small student loan. I did not work the first 6-8 months of our marriage. We found an attic apartment for $ 80. a month including heat and electric. We had a cheap phone bill because Hubby worked for the telephone company. I brought not $1.00 to our marriage because I worked long hours to go to college and every penny paid my way through those 2 years. Those years before I worked, I read every thing I could find in newspapers and books on finance and frugality.. My mother in law gave me a few cookbooks from the WWII era and I made almost every recipe from them. I had exactly $25. a month grocery money. We had no more in the budget because we had to pay all the bills and we were saving for two things that were very important to us: For Hubby to get his B.A. degree in Engineering and to save for a house. Living in that hot apartment made us want to get out of it quickly. So we squeezed every penny we could and made that grocery budget work. We saved money religiously every month for our two goals. I got a job at the telephone company too but not where Hubby worked. I bussed it. I had no driver’s license. Hubby went to school nights and we saved my income and what was what left in his for a down payment for a new home.

We purchased our newly constructed home in the suburbs 1 year and 10 months after we married. We had saved enough money so that we could purchase with cash a bed, a refrigerator, a sofa, and 6 unfinished chairs to use with the used table that Hubby’s mother gave us. I had used green stamps( does anyone remember them?) to get a card table and 4 chairs so we would have a place to sit in the kitchen and eat. His mother also gave us an old dresser. Hubby purchased a door that had been damaged and made and stained 2 end tables out of it to go on either end of the sofa. They were so sturdy that we used them for 32 years. We sold them when we moved to Arizona. I wish I still had them.

We furnished the house as we saved cash to do so. We never ran out and used credit. I worked and got a ride with the man next door who actually was my boss back and forth to work.

I quit my job due to a miscarriage just before Hubby was hit by a car while walking from the parking lot near his work. He had serious damage done to his knee and was in the hospital for weeks and home recovering for weeks. He had switched jobs and hadn’t worked long enough to get full pay for long so we lived on 1/2 pay for a long time. We made it through without borrowing a dime from anyone. But it was a big wake up call. We had some money saved besides money for furniture. But we used almost all of it up while Hubby was out of work.

That wake up call was our journey towards financial independence. We set up an annual budget that paid us first every paycheck. That has been a line item in our budget to this day. We never wanted to wonder again how we were going to make ends meet! We had always been frugal but we turned it way up after that. We still had money set aside for entertainment and things to make life enjoyable every month. We have never felt like we were giving anything up.

Fast forward one year and my first son was born. Fast forward 2 more years and my 2nd son was born. Now we had 4 people in our family so we had to up the grocery budget. It went up to $80. per month. But it included all food, OTC meds, cleaning products, all soap products, cat food, and and personal care products. I only purchased Pampers to use when we went out somewhere. I washed diapers and hung them to dry for years. That saved us a fortune. Up until just before my first son was born, I went to the laundromat every week. But we had saved and set aside money for a washer and dryer. It was our first scratch and dent appliances and with babies I was so grateful for them.

As our money grew, we found places to invest it so that we could make more money. We continued to save every month and it just kept growing. The best part was all of the passive income we made every month.

Yes, we had emergencies come up but we always had the money to pay for them and we still do.

This is getting long and I need to prep our chicken parmesan that we are having for dinner, so I will continue to write more tomorrow. This is a blog post that I decided I was going to do way back when I started blogging in 2007. Now is the time!