As I’ve mentioned before, my husband and I no longer use unsecured credit. 

For a young newlywed couple such as ourselves, the temptation that an easy-to-swipe credit card holds is simply too great.  Also, even during the times when we fooled ourselves into thinking we weren’t spending too much, our purchases far numbered what it would have been if we’d stuck to a strict pay-upfront-only budget. 

“But what about using the card for the rebate?”

A few months before marriage,  in April of 2006 I was granted a great little card with no annual fee, 0% interest on all purchases for 12 months, and a 5% cash rebate on all gash, supermarket, drugstore, and Super Walmart purchases (and 1% everywhere else).  Great!  We’ll use that for everything and save money!  Afterall, it’s 0% interest and 5% rebate!

Terrific deal, right?

Wrong.  Bad deal.

The freedom we felt with that card and the ease of access to funds, coupled with our infant knowledge of budgeting a dual income household with bills eventually led us to a whopping $11,600 in credit card debt by November of 2006.

Talk about feeling like a slave!  Before he met me, my poor husband had never even touched a credit card.  He prefers cash only in every aspect of life.   Now here he was, only 6 months after saying “I Do”, saddled with not only the credit card debt, but with a new mortgage, and 2 car loans.   I felt like I had failed him miserably, and I felt like a miserable failure.  Even at that time, I was known amongst friends as being frugal (or “cheap cheap” as they called me!).  We didn’t have a bunch of fancy new furniture or exotic vacations.  In fact, to this day, I have no idea how we ran up the debt so fast.  Worst of all, we had nothing to show for it.  Perhaps it was due to unaccounted for spending during our honeymoon?  Perhaps it was from the $2000 downpayment we’d “borrowed” for Kevin’s new car?  Perhaps it was the unbudgeted grocery shopping at Super Walmart?  I’m not sure, but I felt like I was living a lie!  How “frugal” was a person with $10k+ in unsecured debt?

So right before my 24th birthday, at the end of November 2006, we sat in the living room (while I was in tears over our plight) cutting up the credit cards.  We both vowed then to truly focus on learning how to control our money habits better (although it would be nearly a year before we developed our budget notebook) - and never use credit cards again.

Our pledge to ourselves has worked wonders.  We haven’t touched a card since - and our $11,600 debt load is now less than $3000.  Kevin’s 2006 chevy sedan will be paid off by April, and my 2004 SUV will be paid off by December.  Plans are also in the works to have our mortgage paid off within 10 years!

Now.   That brings us back to living frugally.  How did we do it?

First of all, I don’t believe any household can run smoothly - or frugally - without an excellent bookkeeping / financial mangement system.  I know ours sure didn’t.  I’m the “head financial manager” (aka, wifely bookkeeper :)) in our family, but our budget sheets allow us both to fully understand everything going on with our accounts.  Excellent records allows our cash flow to go where it needs to go, when it needs to go, and we always stay on top of whom it needs to go to!  It also shows us areas where we may need to cut back (such as if we have too many stops at Big Lots one month!).

We also live frugally by keeping a simple lifestyle.  Perhaps 99% of our furniture and decorative pieces were gifts or purchased second-hand.  We have no qualms with second hand or thrift store items.  In fact, we’d enjoy not having to spend a fortune on it! 

Clothing is perhaps the biggest thing we save on.  When I was younger, I lived for a new pair of jeans.  During my single years it was nothing for me to drop $400 in one shopping session.  It was theraputic!  Nowadays, however, we rarely ever purchase new clothes outside of the unmentionableunderwearandpanties. :)  95% of our clothes now come from second hand shops.  What’s weird is we now wear mainly name brand stuff due to my uncanny ability to find a perfect, sexy pair of Banana Republic or Nautica Jeans for 30 cent at the bottom of the Goodwill bin.  Before our pledge to frugality, we were stuck with Walmart finds and a high clothing bill!  Our baby will also be decked out in Carters, Baby Gap, Disney, and Gymboree thanks to our local thrift store and the people who feel led to get rid of their old stuff.

Our couch and dining room table together cost a total of $150 - my parents purchased it for us from an old lady’s son in a ritzy neighborhood downtown.  She was in a nursing home and he was just clearning out things.  The 3 lamps in our living room were second hand, as well as our wooden coffee table ($5 at a garage sale plus a little sweat equity with sand paper!).  Our entertainment center was a gift from my father, and our (very very comfy!) leather chair was a cast off from Kevin’s birth mother.  Our washer and dryer are the same old ones that were here when we purchased our home in March 2006, as well as our refrigerator.  Our living room television is my 10 year old 19″ TV from teenagehood, our bedroom chesterdrawers are from an old set my mom was getting rid of, our bed frames and oak headboard belonged to my Grandmother, and our kingsize mattress was a wedding present from our uncle.  Even our wall decorations are second hand.  We both love a deep colored, rich, country themed decorating style - so antique looking prints in wooden frames that sell for pennies on the dollar at our local thrift stores are awesome finds for us!

Don’t get me wrong - sure, the materialistic woman inside me rears her head sometimes and longs for a new chenile couch…and the technophile deeper inside longs for a 52 inch plasma TV (ahhhhhh!)….and the Laundry Fairy inside me wants one of those spiffy double-capacity-no-agitator-clear-top-candy-apple-red washing machines.  Yet none of those things will help us reach our bigger goals in life - goals of achieving financial freedom, mortgage freedom, owning rental properties, having a million dollars in our retirement fund, and having a large trust fund for our grandchildren.  So right now, living frugally, and being content with my second-hand flowery couch (which I really do in fact love - it’s very comfy), older fridge, and smaller washer is giving us a great start on life.  

Being a stay at home wife / mom allows me to do all these things much more easily as well.  I now have time to seek out better advice, learn new things, and focus more on homemade meals (instead of our typical $22 Ryan’s Steakhouse run!).  The internet provides a terrific source of advice for me.  Sites such as the HillBilly Housewife, Frugal Abundance, and Organized Home give me loads of tips from making my own Wendy’s style Frosty’s to the best way to plan my cleaning.  Great forums such as the ones at SavingAdvice.com and ChristianMomsForum.com give me plenty of live contacts to pose questions to and learn new things from, while other sites such as MorningStar.com, Bank Rate  and the Motley Fool. provide excellent investment insights.  Reading about the lives of other families from the women bloggers over at Cherish the Home and Pieces of Me provide me each day with tried & true new tips and tricks - straight from the mouths of other women like myself - in managing my own household.

Tagged: housewife

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