Frugal Encouragement
If you're trying to live a frugal lifestyle, it helps to have frugal friends who share your goals and values. Adults are not immune to peer pressure. Friends who go out to eat often (and worse, invite you along Dutch Treat and are surprised when you never come) can make you feel a bit grubby and mean about your lifestyle- or worse, can influence you to break your frugal goals. We've certainly found ourselves at a restaurant, dismayed with ourselves and mentally figuring out what we were going to have to cut from our budget to pay for this just because friends had pushed us to join them often and hard enough that we finally caved in to peer pressure.
People can be, well, less than supportive at times, can't they? This can range from those friendly urgings to spend money you really shouldn't be spending on stuff you really do not need to buy, to outright criticism. In one place we lived we kept a 'compost bucket' under the kitchen sink. Whenever we had compostable scraps* we put them in the bucket, and when it was full we took it out to our compost pile to dump it. At one informal gathering of gals from church one of the young wives started complaining about how overboard her mother-in-law went on frugality, and she ended with something like, "I mean, I can see the point of saving money, but when it comes to keeping your food trash in a bucket in your kitchen, that's just gross." I blinked a bit- she'd been at my house more than a few times, and pointed out, "We do that, it's for compost." She wrinkled her delicate little nose and said pointedly, "Yes. I know."
There was a time when her criticism would have embarrassed me and made me ashamed, but happily for me, at this point in my life I was old enough and she was young enough that the only embarrassment I felt was for her own rudeness, and I must admit, I felt more irritation with her than embarrassment for her. I have to wonder how negatively she might have influenced anybody else in that room listening to her act as though keeping a compost bucket was akin to letting pet mice romp on the kitchen counters, and spitting on the griddle to see if it was hot enough.
If you need some frugal encouragement, here are some links that might help (you'll find good tips there, too):
If you haven't been following the weekly Thursday Four Moms posts, you should. Every Thursday four moms of families of unusual size blog about different topics. Yesterday we talked about cooking from scratch- one of the best ways I know to save money in the kitchen.
- Kim C. writes at Life in a Shoe, and she wrote about cooking from scratch here-
- Kimberly blogs at Raising Olives and she wrote about cooking from scratch here-
- Connie at Smockity Frocks wrote about cooking from scratch here.
- And my regular blog is The Common Room and I wrote about cooking from scratch here.
Another useful online source of frugal encouragement is the weekly frugal tips hosted by Life As a Mom- here is this Friday's list- look at all those tips from all those bloggers! Do be careful though- sometimes what somebody thinks is a frugality is really just another way to spend money.
You may also enjoy Penny-Wise Platter Thursday, another weekly round up of blog posts featuring healthy and frugal recipes. You can find some good ideas as well as good blogs through these links. The Five Dollar Dinner Challenge is another weekly round up, this time the them is complete dinners you can prepare for under five dollars (that's approximately for a family of 4 or 5 people, I think).
In addition to finding good ideas and encouragement from online sources, you can use these online sources to take your real life friendships to a more mutually encouraging level. Here are a couple of ideas for how this could work:
1. When you find a post on frugality or with a good frugal recipe that you think your unfrugal friends would enjoy, share it with them- either print it out, or email it to them. Be careful with this- the idea is NOT to preach- just to share a post you genuinely think they will enjoy on its own merits that also happens to be frugal.
2. Cook one of the meals you find from one of these frugal sources and invite your friends over for dinner.
3. They just want to spend time with you. Find frugal activities that your friends will enjoy and be proactive about substituting them for the unfrugal activities they keep inviting you to do. If they ask you out a lot, invite them to brown bag -it with you for a picnic lunch at the park or your own backyard. Or have them over for a baked potato bar or a a soup and salad bar (you make a frugal soup and home-made bread, offer a basic lettuce salad, and invite friends to bring other salad components). If they invite you to a gym that isn't in your budget, invite them to go walking with you once a week or a couple of times a month. If they invite you to go shopping with them, ask them if you can have them over for tea when they are done shopping instead, or say you'll come if they will go to your favorite store- and take them a thrift shop or consignment store.
4. Be honest with them. If you have a particular bill you're trying to pay off- a student loan, a car payment, explain to them that you've decided you really need to pay down this particular bill as fast as possible and the best way to do this is to avoid hanging at the mall, going out to eat, ski trips, or whatever outside-your-current-budget idea that your friends long for you to do with them.
5. Don't be preachy, boring, or moralizing- be the sort of friends you want to have- don't guilt trip your friends, don't be the kind of friend who only talks about one hobby horse, don't make them feel like you think they are inferior to you because they of how you save money. Find other subjects to talk about than how you saved money this week if that is not an interesting topic to your friends- presuming these are friends you want to keep.
What are some of the ways you maintain friendships with friends who don't share your frugal goals and inadvertently encourage you to break them?
Where do you find frugal encouragement?
What are some frugal ways you have found to have fun with friends?
Share your ideas in the comments!
related posts:
- Composting Alright, you city folk, apartment dwellers, thinking that this whole...
- Are You Frugal Or Resourceful? I enjoy listening to the NPR show Splendid Table, but...
- A tour of Frugal Hacks Since we have so many new readers here at Frugal...
- A Call To Being Not Frugal I wondered if this was the place to write about...
- New on the Frugal Blogroll We added 6 new members to the Frugal Blogroll for...
9 Responses to “Frugal Encouragement”
April 16th, 2010 at 10:09 am
[...] The Rest of the Story [...]
April 16th, 2010 at 10:13 am
RIGHT ON, SISTER!!! I love this post! Spot on with the, “…invite you along Dutch Treat and are surprised when you never come…feel a bit grubby and mean about your lifestyle…” and I laughed my head off over the “spitting on the griddle” bit. But I have to say, I must be awfully jaded, I just can’t get on board with attempting to convert a spendy person. A girl can only take so much of that, “…wrinkled her delicate little nose…” act!
April 16th, 2010 at 10:25 am
You aren’t supposed to spit on the griddle???
April 16th, 2010 at 11:05 am
I’ve learned a lot just from reading your blog and the other 4 Mommy’s. I have some great frugal ideas I want to try. For example making more yogurt out of the one we buy. What a great idea, my family loves yogurt and I can’t afford to buy it all the time. I always believed I needed to buy some fancy machine, but one of the 4 Mommy’s explained how to make my own and it looks so uncomplicated! Yay!
I love that you compost, I really want to do that. My hubby is not into building me a compost bin, do I need a bin? Or is there some easier way for this too?
Thanks!
April 16th, 2010 at 11:49 am
We are able to use the base bowling alley. In the summer they offer booklets where you prebuy games for $20. It ends up being $.50 a game to bowl. We usually buy 2-3 books. We have taken other families on base to bowl. We gave one booklet to a group of young army guys since we knew that they are away from home, lonely, and broke.
We had friends that every Christmas would invite 7 families over. Each was responsible for a vegetable, a starch dish, 2 brought desserts, a salad, bread, and the host family made the meat. The rooms were lit with candles and the Chirstmas tree. The plates were loaded in the kitchen and then brought in by their kids (who then went to a back room to eat pizza,popcorn, and watch movies)You were to dress from Sunday best to formal. They had sparkling grape juice. It was so nice.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Jenny D.- I wasn’t thinking so much about ‘converting’ the spendy, trendy friends- I agree that can be a serious exercise in mutual frustration unless they are asking for help. But if you already have spendy friends and then you change your spending habits to frugal, it can be hard on the friendship. Assuming they are friends you want to keep, you may want to find ways to help them understand why you do what you do, even if they never want to, and reach out in other ways so as not to burn bridges.
Cindee, you crack me up. Lollie, I am planning on writing about composting this coming Friday- that’s what the asterisk was there, but I forgot to explain.;-0
Holly, what a great idea!
April 18th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
My friend and I are both half korean and half white, however we are very much american since neither of us knows how to speak korean let alone know any of the family on that side. But we love korean food, there’s this small place and you have to know its there because it’s not listed, and we go there to eat lunch, and then head to the mall to get our bubble tea drinks, and we walk around and look through the stores, but we always put stuff back, and then we sit down at our favorite couch in the store and talk for hours! its a lot of fun and we don’t pressure the other one to spend anything, infact we are pretty proud of ourselves when don’t buy anything else.
My hubs has a friend and they are still young and they are very much the spenders, generally we try to use a coupon for what it is we are going out to, or just hang out at their place and play pool, its one of my fav things to do but im not paying 75 cents -$1 to play every time.
April 18th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
i have many friends who spend, spend, spend…one of them i suspect might qualify to be on that reality show called “hoarders”..i am sometimes so frugal that i have been told i can make a nickel cry…what makes me feel really great though is that once in a blue moon i am told by such friends that the idea i shared with them on making something work or saving time and money was just what they needed. i just smile back and keep my “i told you so” comments to myself…and enjoy the compliments when they come. the invitation to lunch that turns out to be “dutch-treat” is like having your pockets picked..if you cannot afford the lunch then turn down the invite.
April 21st, 2010 at 9:16 am
I have missed this site so much! I used to be in the Frugal Hacks gang, back when I had my blog, Frugal Franny. I sold it a couple of years ago and now am doing freelancing blogging for different clients. One of those is a company called Mercardi.com/home and they buy and sell unwanted gift cards. So I thought, “man, I need to tell my frugal blogger friends about this!”
So, there you go. Hope all is well and consider yourself told!! lol
Leave a Comment