Remodeling This Life

This is a guest post from Tales From The Road Less Traveled. She blogs about “Household finance for all family types”. Check her site out and if you like what you see, subscribe to her feed!

I may not be remodeling my life, but I am sure remodeling my husband! Four months ago, I started using The Grocery Game and religiously using coupons for all of our household cleaning and grocery shopping trips. My husband, Wes, started out as a skeptic. After all, coupons don’t really save that much and there was “no real way for us to cut our grocery costs any more than we already have.” Since my first few weeks of the game, Wes has been to the store with me a couple of times. The first time, he watched in awe as our total came down from $300 to $160, including beer and wine purchases that we had no coupons for.

Since then, he’s been going shopping with me just for the amusement factor and to see if I can keep up the savings over the long term. Now that he’s convinced, he tells his friends, my friends, and everyone who stops long enough to listen about his “wife who writes about personal finance and saves insane amounts of money by using coupons.”

Last night, Wes was replaced by alien coupon clippers. I sent him to the store for some wine, since we were having a dinner guest. When he came back, he was grinning from ear to ear and couldn’t wait to tell me the news. He picked up ice cream (impulse buy, but I’m totally not gonna argue over ice cream!) and two containers of topping… caramel and chocolate. Then, with a flourish that I’m sure he practiced on his way home, he informed me that he found a coupon for $1.50 off 2 ice cream toppings, and that with the coupon, buying two name brand toppings cost far less per ounce than buying one large jar of the store brand.

At this point, I didn’t know whether to laugh or applaud! My husband, the former spendthrift, not only used a coupon (that I didn’t give him), but he compared the unit price for the best deal too. I believe the world must surely be coming to an end. But, at least I have ice cream and caramel to celebrate.

My mom and I had a conversation a few days ago about contentment and how it affects her life.  She said to me, “being discontent has been quite expensive for me”. She meant that because she hasn’t had a great deal of confidence in her life, she has continually tried to find her identity in material things. She has never really found who she wants to portray herself as to the world everyday and just felt comfortable. When she sees friends, she sees all the things that they are that she is not and has a hard time with that instead of seeing herself for all the fabulous yet different things that she has to offer.

During that conversation she also said to me, “I want to learn how to be happy with what I am not”. Here she is, someone who has sought contentment and happiness in material things, and she’s not very happy. She’s not entirely unhappy but she is self aware enough to realize that there are things she wishes weren’t so in her life and she wants to make peace with who she is and stop feeling insecure and the need to be something she is not.  She and my father have done well for themselves financially and so she has been able to literally afford the insecurity and the expense of her discontent, but that doesn’t make it any better.  She has paid another price entirely that she can’t truly afford because being discontent means wasting precious time and energy in the short amount of time we’re given.

We talked in that conversation about my life when I was in my late teens and early twenties, up until just a couple of years ago, when I was in the same trap. I can look back with certainty and say that the unrest in my life then and the discontent I felt was because I was trying to keep up with and be accepted by people. I wanted people to like me and the way I tried to do that was to impress them with the way I looked and the things I had. I was defining myself in material goods. It was expensive and I was miserable.

As we spoke about that time of unhappiness in my life, she said that she can see over the past year or so that I have grown into what she wishes she had. She wants to be able to say “good enough” and live with it and stop striving for nicer clothes, a newer and different house, and all the things that she fell into the trap of during her life to try to impress others. Letting other people influence who we are, what we spend money on and how we define ourselves can lead to an endless path of spending if we’re not careful or aware enough to see it.

My mom also said to me in that conversation, “You aren’t just frugal, Em. You’re content. Frugal is just a result of your contentment. It would be really hard to be frugal and live simply the way you do if you weren’t confident and content enough to live it with a smile on your face.”  I think that may pretty much sum up how frugality has become such a big part of my life in the past year or so. It fell into place once I found myself content and happy with what is. I stopped seeking happiness in what others think of me. I stopped letting others influence my tastes and choices.  I started to see in others how they were living in that trap and instead of following them through the insecurity that leads to living a life that isn’t authentically mine, I chose to go a different way.  I chose to not let what other people think of a small and simple life influence me and instead embraced it for all the beauty it presented to my life. I realized that material things make life comfortable but instead of striving for things that are beyond my reach, I know now to be appreciative of what I have. I can constantly improve, change, and even spend money.  But, I have learned that doing so for anyone but myself is a sure way to live an expensive yet unhappy and unfulfilled life.

I have been on a memo, list-making, organizing rampage as of late. Too many last minute phone calls to doctors to check what time my appointment is and too many photos found strewn around the house that need to be hung.

I headed to target and picked up a 4 pack of cork board squares and used some fabric I had around the house and some upholstery tacks.

It also helps, but is not required, that you have a cute helper with a bossy pointer finger

Don’t forget, I am really lazy, not very crafty, but I like things to look pretty. I simply cut the fabric and wrapped the cork board with it and then attached the fabric with the tacks.

I made a couple of them - one for memos and notes in the kitchen and one for photos of the kiddos to hang in my bedroom. It seemed like a fun, decorative way to display things around here and it cost me $5!

Last night, hubby and I sat down outside and were having one of those reminiscing conversations. We talked about where we’ve been in the 11 years we’ve been together and all the different things that we’ve gone through. We’ve lived in 4 different cities, spent time where both of us worked, neither of us worked and just one of us worked - me for a while when he stayed home with our newborn daughter and then he went back to work so I could stay home with her.

Our financial situation has changed in the direction of making less as the years have gone on. It seems to be the norm in life that people want to continue to make more money as time goes on. Most people can look back on 10 years ago and laugh at how little they were making then. We can look back on 10 years ago and the money we were making was twice as much more, but oh my was the lifestyle that went with it not a fun one to uphold - and oddly enough, we have better financial security with more money in the bank now than we ever did before. We’ve learned through the years that it’s not always about making more but being wise with what we do have and holding onto it. I’ve also come to realize that by learning to live well on less, we’re giving what we do have saved more power, we’re ensuring that it can last longer and take us further because we have learned to live on less.

That leads me to where we have ended up today. It has been and will continue to be an adventure, our life together. But one thing that I can safely say is that if we’ve learned and changed anything in the years we’ve been together it has been changing from a focus of making more more more to living well on less and making time for valuable things in life like time with family versus long hours working at the office or traveling for work.

I know there are all sorts of angles to take on money and how much one makes and whether it defines people or rules people. I think it is safe to say that there are a lot of people out there that continually want to make more money. When they do, their lifestyle shifts upwardly with it. Bigger house, new cars, more stuff. It’s how it’s done. Make more, spend more. That is the beauty of personal finance though - it’s personal and each person gets to do what works for them and makes them comfortable and happy - and live well on their terms.

Living well means different things to different people. For some people to feel they are living well, they need to have a $500 bottle of wine with dinner. For other people it’s their home that makes them feel they’ve “made it” and are living well. We all have different things that define that for us. I am trying to live a life in which living well is about things money can’t buy - being smart, athletic, artistic, creative, loving - spending time with my family, going for a run on a cool morning, enjoying my kids with ice cream smeared faces on a Saturday afternoon. I want to always remember that for myself, living well doesn’t have to mean living expensively.

I sat watching the hockey playoffs with a baby boy in my lap last night. As he snuggled and did his usual cute little things he does when he gets tired, like giving lots of hugs and kisses and giggles, I realized that I was feeling indulged. Usually, bedtime is pretty normal - curl up in bed with books and songs. Tonight, though, we made the exception for hockey. I mean, who doesn’t make exceptions for hockey?! So he laid in my lap and sipped his milk and dozed off. My daughter sat nearby doing some quiet reading and then some coloring. Hubby was snoring on the couch.

I sat there, surrounded by my sweet family, watching a sporting event on TV with little distraction and felt totally and completely indulged. Which seems funny to me because it’s not like watching TV in your own home with fuzzy reception while a baby holds you down on a chair is particularly refreshing. Or at least it seems like it shouldn’t be. But it was.

I got thinking about all the things I fool myself into thinking I am missing out on when it comes to relaxing and making time for myself. Do I really need a day at the spa to unwind and feel indulged? Or can I accomplish it much easier by unwinding with people around me who matter and enjoying watching something I love? I get pedicures from time to time. I enjoy time alone at the coffee shop sipping lattes and reading magazines full of pretty house pictures. But when I look back on my life someday, it’s not moments at the spa that I will remember as being full of joy and relaxation, it’s moments with my family, where even though I am still on-duty as mom, I let myself go a little. Bend the rules for an evening. Indulge the kids in a little bedtime fun and indulge myself in some pure, plain, simple relaxation.

A lot of times, things that we think we want or need to unwind or relax and indulge ourselves don’t turn out to be all their cracked up to be. A wise wise friend has said this perfectly another way, I enjoy the idea of some things more than the reality. I have found that it is usually the idea of bigger stuff that ends up falling short of my expectations. But there are things that feel indulging and they are all they are cracked up to be - they are fulfilling and relaxing and wonderful - and often they come with little or no price tag, which means you get to leave your guilt behind.

Whether it’s a long bubble bath after the kids are in bed or curling up outside with a good book on a sunny day, or an hour of relaxing fun in the garden, there are so many little things we can do daily to fill that need for feeling indulged - feeling like we’re doing something that is just for us, relaxing, and filling the tank back up, and the more I think about it the more I realize that little stuff can do just as well if not better when it comes to those things.