Journey To Enough

The crowd gasps. There have been times on our financial journey since we got serious in 2021 that I have buckled down and spent less. In fact theres a lot of months in my financial binder that I aim for lean months.
but rather than label myself frugal or aim to be frugal I aim for value based spending, and spending less on stupid stuff I don’t care about. Sure, sometimes my adhd monkey part oof my brain adds to cart when I shouldn’t or
wander Target a little too long when the kids were little. There has also been times we chose a too expensive housing payment or rental, and we crunched the numbers and it didn’t align with our money goals. So the key is: we changed it. We are always willing to change what’s not working.

We aim for value based budgeting. Some of these concepts are from the books: Die With Zero, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, The Millionaire Next Door and my OG The Simple Path to Wealth.

Housing has always been the no good, very big expense.

Travel is my high value expense.
Some people like spas, handbags, clothes or hobbies. I watch google flights, vrbo and have wishlists on Airbnb. I have planned lean vacations, and I have planned vacations knowing I wanted to spend more. I don’t agree that for every experience more has to be spent, but I do agree that certain vacations will cost more. For our first 10 years of parenting we did not choose to go on an airplane with our four kids, for instance… part of that was the expense, and part of it was my lovely newly developed flying anxiety after becoming a mom.
So when we went to Italy in 2025 for the first time, all six of us were thrilled and appreciated it all the more. But since we got married in 2013, we did vacation! Then after having kids, we drove many places in our used minivan, and it was much cheaper than flying. We have never cut the travels because it brings us both a lot of value and we highly value our kids learning to adapt and experience places.

Consumer Goods

The usual trap, the TV commercials, the algorithim, the billboards everywhere, the nonstop emails in my inbox. Every product promises a dopamine hit, a problem solved, or happiness. And it never does.

For my own reasons, I always buy the kids new shoes. I tend to buy 90% of their clothes new and only 10% are secondhand. Groceries are our second highest cost item, and are personal for every family. I’m a food snob (probably partially how my brain works since childhood, I hyper fixate on meals and I’m particular) I cook two to three times a day, but I don’t buy all the top ingredients, I don’t shop at the luxury grocery stores, and I shop 90% at Aldi. I avoid fast food and chain restaurants, and choose authentic restaurants instead. I aim to avoid ultra processed foods and not buy prepackaged foods 80% of the time, and it happens to be cheaper to make bread than buy bread. We’re not a snack family, so that’s also cheaper. But still, I don’t think I’m frugal I just try to focus spending on value rather than mindlessness. We eat out 2 – 3 times a month not because it’s convenient but because it’s an experience we know is a luxury that wouldn’t be special if it happened all the time. We know it’s a mark-up and luxury, and if we needed to have a lean budget that month, it can easily be cut.

Entertainment

We cut cable in 2011 and never looked back. We have a free activities we all enjoy, that also saves money. I usually cycle through subscriptions but I made a goal this year to get rid of Netflix, Disney, and discovery plus! All of them! To focus on reading more, less commercials for the kids, and utilize my library DVDs more instead. I whipped out my dvd players again. I like the going analog trend, and most of my adulthood I’ve limited TV. Most of this goal WASNT money based, it was value based for a more 90s style childhood… it just happens to save about $10 per month! And $100 per year!!! The commercials Netflix added enraged me, and their price hikes, and also I wanted the kids to have a slower pace at home without cycling by thrugh tv shows. We have four kids, but no tablets. That saves money too but we chose it for their brain health. Maybe that makes me old school, but that’s fine. I know I could be much more extreme cutting costs, and the FIRE people say I’m wasting money, but I try to keep balance.

Hobbies

Admittedly, this isn’t a huge issue for me… anymore. I used to have a lot of trouble with this, and true to adhd I would cycle through buying an insane amount of supplies for a hobby I’d start and give up, left with yarn and paint and remnants of chaos. These days with kids now, we utilize parks, playgrounds, libraries, hikes, biking, skateboarding, reading, road trips, and when the kids have an interest they’d like to pursue I look for a free demo class, or we try to involve ourselves in showing them how. Which means… *gasp* we aren’t paying for sports, and we aren’t paying for extracurricular classes. We’re going against the grain of the majority of American parents… I suppose. Over the years our kids have tried out unstructured gymnastics once a month, a tennis day camp once, running competitions, and lots and lots of art! I have never considered them deprived. I don’t agree with the parental stress push that little Aiden might become a pro athlete! At 7! So you need to book your weekends and practice sports for *scholorships, *college, *pro athlete dreams, and *reasons. We value our kids having free time, but we also have four of them so they have to share their time with their siblings anyway and have to manage expectations to scheduling. Because we don’t choose those costs, I can buy countless art supplies for the kids. If this changes, and one of the kids wants to try an activity, we know we can be strategic and creative about finding extracurriculars that fit into the budget.

Vehicles

Once upon a time we had two fancy cars, and two fancy car payments. My dumbass took a family members advice to LEASE A CAR one time. And our other dumbass move was a fancy fast sports car. Fortunately our housing was so cheap at the time we couod afford the car payments, but don’t make me calculate the lost money we couod have had in 2013-2017 the years of the dumb cars, and the years earlier we couod have retired. This is why I’m thankful to be able to read, so I finally read about finances in 2020. Shout-out to The Simple Path to Wealth who started it all, and helped me stop making idiotic financial choices just because everyone around me made it seem normal.

Consumer upgrades

New phones? Nope. We buy used phones and keep them until they die. New electronics? Nope. Refurbished. I need to calculate how much this has actually saved us. He’s had countless coworkers ask how old his phone is, and shocked it still works. But that just goes to show you – people don’t usually fix things and use things until they die.

Renovating

HGTV lied to me. Society lied to me. They made it seem like the financially frugal choice to renovate. It’s an investment! It builds equity! That’s just what us American dream followers do! I was brainwashed into thinking renovating was the smart, frugal thing to do. Renovating cost me time, money, and stress. And if we wouldn’t have poured our own blood, sweat, tears, and countless Home Depot weekends and weekday after work projects we would have spent… double. At least.

It’s easy to tell what I value based on my budget. And I’m not trying to spend the very least on every category… I guess that makes me not a part of the frugal club! If I’m in my budget, and I’m meeting my investing goals – I’m not going to feel guilty. I’m not going to practice extremism, I want to show my kids balance, prioritization and values. And if I’m spending too much on a category (I look at the most expensive categories first) – I’m willing to change it immediately.