Remodeling This Life

I went for a run the other day - my first time in what feels like a while. Months probably. Set aside for surgery, illness, recovery and then just pure lack of motivation, it felt good to lace up my running shoes and take off down the road.

I started running when I was 14, encouraged by my father who was a runner in his high school days and by my older brother who seemed to take after my father’s natural ability for it, unlike me.

In the past 15 years, I have run on a team while despising it, I have also run on a team while purely enjoying it, I have run for myself for fun, I have run for competition and for pure joy. I have run through bone fractures, the flu, and knee injuries. I have set running on the back burner to recover from injuries and illnesses and pregnancies, along with sheer exhaustion and lack of motivation.

It has always been there, ready and waiting, when I have been ready to start up again. I ran the other day for a few miles through aching muscles and swarming deer flies. Running just seems to be a sport that I enjoy immensely despite the obvious elements of torture. It’s not easy to be a runner. I have had to muster courage, desire, and strength to keep up the sport that I love all these years.

I have learned that while much of the heart of running is in racing, it doesn’t have to be. I run today, and for most of the past 10 years, for myself. Not for the competition, not for racing. I don’t have to be the best or the fastest. I have found other benefits that make running worthwhile like health and wellness. I also have learned that competing with myself to push myself further, exclusive of what anyone else around me is doing, is worth more than a place I could finish in a race. I only measure my progress against myself. Other people train differently, have different bodies with different limitations and expectations. To measure myself against anyone but me would be a mistake a sure way to give up and never run again.

The same is true of finances. Everyone has different needs, different sized families, different living expenses, different things that make them happy. To measure my financial success and frugality against anyone but myself would set myself up for failure. To see one person spend less on such and such while I spend more doesn’t matter. Perhaps we live in different areas, perhaps that person’s priorities are different than mine. Some people would say spending money to fix a home is money wasted. For them, perhaps. For me, not at all. I can only measure my success in terms of my past. Am I doing better than I was last year? Two years ago? Am I making progress and reaching *my* goals? No one else’s goals - my goals.

Much like other things in life, running brings out joys, triumphs, hurt, and struggle. It’s not always easy. There are bumps along the way, setbacks, times of just having to throw in the towel and say “another day, but not today”.

Frugality tends to show the same trends in my life. Some times I can get going on months of excellent spending habits, saving for tomorrow, making great decisions. Then an illness comes along, a surgery, a car repair, a home repair, whatever it may be and frugality goes out the window. Sometimes I have just had to say “another day, but not today”. Today, I have to spend this money and I will because it’s just how things go. I’ll take a break, with no guilt and do what needs to be done, knowing full well that when I’m ready and things are back on track and in place, frugality will be there waiting for me.

Life isn’t perfect, nor is a decade and a half of running. There are struggles, injuries, times that you just have to stop and say for the sake of sanity and health that it is time to lay off for a little while. Enjoy things another way. Do what needs to be done.

And then lace up your shoes and hit the streets again when you’re ready, at your pace and heading toward your goals.

I went grocery shopping with my mom yesterday at Price Chopper and then we went and filled up the gas tank with gasoline and she saved $2.20/gallon off her gasoline! How? By using the Fuel AdvantEdge program. For every $50 you spend at Price Chopper, you save 10 cents/gallon off your gasoline at participating Sunoco stations.

Obviously, to have saved $2.20/gallon, mom has been saving up her reward for quite a while. That or she spends a lot on groceries. I’ll never tell It probably helps a little that I shop there when I am here and use her card so she gets credit for my shopping too. But I don’t think my grocery budget puts too much of a dent into her gasoline savings

She filled up for $1.99/gallon and all she had to do was buy groceries that she has to buy anyway. Pretty neat deal.

I have mentioned before that I love Starbucks. Say what you will, but I love that place. Yet, for 6 weeks, here I am at the cottage and the closest Starbucks is a 30 minute drive. You betcha I am not leaving the serenity of this place and driving that far just for a latte. I may be a coffee junkie but I am no fool.

I have had to get creative and have started making my very own chai lattes at home. I bought a box of Tazo Chai mix for the price of one grande latte and it makes 5 homemade lattes. I have been getting my weekly daily fix right here at home and I must say that a latte in a big mug while curled up in the gazebo overlooking the lake during naptime beats a trip to Starbucks anyday.

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.