Frugal Living Gives You More Time For Important Things
What prompted your decision to be frugal? Did you need to catch up on bills? Maybe, you were always just short of money? Perhaps you met someone who always had their finances in line to accomplish their goals. You asked, “ How?” and they gave you a verbal sketch of frugal living…
People become frugal to satisfy some need or want in their lives (and it always has a financial factor). After living frugally for a while, many discover the great benefits of being frugal and make it a permanent lifestyle.
Living frugally – living within your means – gives you a larger sense of purpose. Dreams you once had that no longer seemed achievable because of poor finances can be considered again. Your skills in planning and finding creative ways to earn and save money have developed to the point that you now have the time and the funds to enjoy life. You have the liberty to do important things that are significant to you.
Living frugally– improves your social relationships.
Frugal Living Gives You More Time For Important Things
As with any major project, setting up a frugal lifestyle takes time and effort. But once it’s a routine habit with the kinks worked out and our finances under control, we can call it life. We now have more time and money to use as we wish.
We can now start applying frugal living skills to things we want, not just the things we need.
For some, that may mean a return to school with a plan to pursue a different career path. For others, it will be the vacation of a lifetime.
There’s a great amount of space between those two goals (or outside of them). Room enough for your dream. What’s important to you? What would you like to accomplish?
We Know Frugal Living Frees Up Money.
Having your money available for your use rather than being owned by creditors is a major benefit of adopting a frugal lifestyle. No matter how tentative your first attempts at frugal living may have been when it changed your financial landscape from desert to cropland, you became an enthusiast. You were willing to do anything to keep moving toward your goal of financial freedom. Frugal living gave you victory. After a victory like that, most people are committed to living frugally.
Think about this:
Freeing up money through frugal living can also benefit many people who are not in debt. Many in this group are getting by OK. They are staying out of debt, but they’re not thriving. Goals like buying a house, paying for their kids to go college, or even doing something extravagant just because they want to are out of reach. As with those in debt, their dreams are on hold or dead.
When these people embrace a frugal lifestyle, they do it for the same reason a person in debt does. They want to change their circumstances and increase their financial options. They also will do whatever it takes to have their dreams.
What It Takes
Note: These are examples, not a complete plan ready for execution.
1. Find ways to cut expenditures, especially nonessentials: Use coupons and find items on sale. Walk to work or take the bus instead of driving. Play with your kids instead of taking them to the movies.
2. Increase income: There are abundant opportunities to make extra money – overtime at work, second jobs, and market a skill.
3. Save money: It’s counterproductive to spend more on something not goal-oriented. Save towards getting out of debt or for specific goals.
4. Execute your plan: Make a timeline or an achievement line with mini-goals or milestones indicated. Keep track of progress.
5. Stay involved: Look for ways to speed up your timeline. Or recoup setbacks. (Hopefully, there are few of those.)
6: Achieve your goal: Enjoy! Revel in your victory.
What Happens After You Reach Your Goal?
After you experience a victory, you won’t want to return to the way things were and hope for the best. Continue being frugal… You can’t convince me there isn’t something more you want out of life. Develop and achieve more goals.
What have we learned?
We learned we can use frugal living practices to be debt free.
We learned we could only do with a few things that we once considered essential.
We learned we have to save money to finance our dreams.
We learned we need to make a conscious effort to achieve our goals.
What should we have learned?
We should have learned that we can accomplish our goals and dreams, but we may need to change our lifestyle.
We should have learned that once we accomplish a goal by living frugally, we cannot return to an old non-frugal lifestyle if we desire to continue to accomplish more. It makes sense to assume the old lifestyle would again limit or destroy future achievement. A frugal lifestyle is a lifetime lifestyle.
My Take
By being frugal, you get out of debt or buy that new car, house, etc., and you will have proved you can accomplish great things. Why would you want to go back to a non-frugal lifestyle?
Why would you not continue to go in the direction you are now going? You wanted something. You worked for that something. You got that something.
Frugal living practices can greatly help you to achieve your goals.
Once frugal living stabilizes your finances, you’ll find time to enjoy the benefit of the money your save. (Goals achieved.) The plan works.