Reflections on the Evolution of this Blog and the Pursuit of Money Mindfulness

I'd planned on writing a whole long post in honor of my 8th bloggiversary... January 2 started my 9th year of blogging, which I have to say feels like quite the accomplishment.... But life got in the way and unfortunately this planned post is nearly six months late. Oh well.

In honor of my bloggiversary I wanted to reflect on all the changes that have happened in my life that have happened since I started my blog, and consequently the change in direction this blog has taken.

When I first started this blog my husband was working a minimum wage job and I was working a minimum wage part time job, and we were not making it through the month. We truly were Penniless, our expenses were minimal but even so they were more than we could afford, and we made the decision not long after starting my blog to downsize to an apartment half the size of our original small one, to a teeny tiny house with our two small kids, in order to save a few hundred dollars a month.

My blog reflected my life at the time. Extreme frugality. Cutting corners every single way we could. As someone put it 'pinching pennies so hard they scream'. Things like making every single thing from scratch, nearly only vegan meals, foraging most of my produce, using cloth toilet paper and cloth diapers and making presents from scratch. My clothes were all from clothing swaps and second hand stores and I literally tried to spend absolutely nothing extra that I didn't have to.

Quality of life? Well, I'm the type of person who is so good at pretending everything is all right that sometimes I even convince myself that everything is all right when it is not. I was all `mind over matter' and thought that if I just focused on all the good things I had in life, the areas in which I was a 'have not' wouldn't bother me. I blogged about that more or less, and while I wouldn't exactly say I was lying, because it wasn't intentional or 100% accurate, in retrospect all my posts about how amazing and rich my life was, even without money, might not have been a little misleading. Because in all honestly, I was misleading myself. But when you're going through such a situation, what other choice do you have? To just be miserable and mopey and think about how sucky your life is? The better alternative is to focus on the benefits of such a lifestyle and be on denial about how hard it is and how bone weary tired you are all the time from it. You might not realize, though, if you become good enough at faking it that you have yourself fooled as I did. Back then I might have written posts that seemed to glorify poverty or similar.

Fortunately with time, random occurrences, and some miracles and my mother's extreme generosity, our financial situation changed. My husband's income went up significantly, my income went up significantly, and we also get disability payments because of my son's autism. These things definitely made it easier for us to breathe financially, and I was able to stop doing some of the extreme frugality things I had been doing. I stopped making everything from scratch, especially gifts, and reconsidered my stance on gifting period, and instead started focusing on things that I felt were better from scratch, like most foods, which I am able to make just as good if not better quality when made from scratch, and for cheaper.

In short, my style of frugality changed tremendously. Instead of it being "do whatever I can as cheap as absolutely possible, and don't spend any money more than necessary" my motto and method in life when it came to frugality became something along the lines of "spend less on the things you don't care about so that you have the money available for the things that matter to you". This outlook, I'll admit, is one that I am actually privileged enough to be able to have. Because beforehand, when money is so extremely tight, you don't really have that wiggle room; its not like you can just "cut out those lattes" and be able to afford extra. You aren't spending money on lattes, you aren't spending any money on extras, and you still have nothing to spare. And it really sucks.


At the time, when people recommended that I do what I can to earn extra money, instead of just trying to look for ways to spend less, I bristled at them, because I said that it's not always easy to earn more... but at the end of the day, that's what we did. My husband started working longer hours, and fortunately laws passed that raised the hourly salary in his profession. I started hustling however I could. I taught classes, foraging classes and frugal shopping classes, taught soap making classes, sold homemade soaps. I started charging money to give people more personal advice on how to live more frugally in a way that worked for their family, I started making and selling gluten free products, like bread mix, decorated cakes, sushi, etc. I made and sold ebooks of recipes for my religion's holidays. My husband started making and selling wooden things. And slowly it paid off. My name got out, my reputation grew, and there was more demand for my services. And with that, fortunately we had that extra money that afforded us the privilege to change our money habits and perspective into what it is currently.

When I first started therapy, I'll be honest, that one of the things that came up most often, and even led me to breaking down in tears quite a few times, was that I felt I was such a faker, a fraud on my blog. That I led people to believe that it was great to live without more money, that frugal living was super awesome, that I had this most unbelievable amazing life. And really what I felt like was that it sucked big time. But I had to put on this front of "oh my gosh, look how amazing my frugal life is" or I'd lose all credibility I had on my blog, and my name would be tarnished. I had dreams of sudden cash windfalls so that we'd have so much spare cash and we wouldn't have to work so darn hard anymore. And it was really difficult.
So now I'm coming clean now to you.

I wasn't intentionally lying when I talked about how amazing my life was before. I was in denial because I didn't have much choice. I decided to shove my depression so deep down that I was living in a dissociative state for years, and didn't realize how much my lifestyle was affecting my mentally. How much it was breaking me. How much I was suffering but didn't let myself even acknowledge.

The biggest change happened when my mother gave us the down payment and allowed us to move to our larger home. Our larger home is still quite smaller than most people's houses. We're only living in 925 square feet, but that feels like a mansion compared to our old 484 square foot home. When we finally moved, I felt like a weight that had crushed me for the last 5 years suddenly was lifted from my chest. I allowed myself to breathe a sigh of relief and admit just how much of a toll it was emotionally to be living in that tiny place with 4 kids. I smiled every time I was able to walk across my living room without tripping across someone or something. I smiled every time we had guests and were able to offer them a place to sit down on our two couches. I was able to make my home into an inviting place and finally admit what I thought of my old place -- that it was a sh*thole. (Sorry for the coarse language. That literally is the only word I can use now to describe our old home.)

To be honest, I'm crying as I'm writing this post.

If I ever glorified tiny home living, I'm sorry. It's not. It's a great way to save money, that's for sure, and its what our finances demanded for all those years. And quite frankly it was less hard before our last two children were born. When I see people share videos of people on Facebook and their "tiny house living with families" I cringe and I wonder how many of them are just like me and post about how amazing it is because they have no choice about how they're living and they are trying to put on a positive face and make the best of their situation, and how many are authentically happy with their shoebox. Maybe I'm projecting, but those videos just make me sad.

I feel like I'm kind of veering off topic. So back to the focus of this blog.

I actually got inspired to write this post because someone left me a comment after a sponsored post I had about how to get new smart phones frugally. She said that talking about getting new smart phones when your old one was still functional was encouraging materialism and consumerism and went against what my blog stood for, and made me a fraud. I apologize. I apologize for misleading you into thinking that that is what my blog was about. My blog was and always will be a reflection of my life, and what I write about reflects where my head is at. I'm not against spending money. I am not against buying new things. I have no problem with upgrading to a new smartphone. In fact, I'm currently on my fourth or fifth smartphone. (A Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. It's awesome.)

So what is my blog about? What is the current focus of my blog? (And honestly, this has been the focus of mine ever since we had enough money to be able to breathe a little bit financially.)

I've wanted to change the tag line of my blog from "A Rich Life on a Minimum Wage" to something like "The Pursuit of Money Mindfulness".  (A new banner is currently in the works.) When I posted about this on Facebook, asking people for their input on that, I got a lot of flack for it. That "mindfulness" is stupid. It's a "new age fad" and all sorts of other negative feedback.

But you know what? I don't care.

In therapy, one of the most effective tools I've learned, especially to stop dissociating, especially to stop panic attacks and other extreme emotions that I've been dealing with, has been mindfulness. Mindfulness is used in therapy in conjunction with CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) skills and it is about remaining present in the moment, and aware, and not doing things mindlessly.

My current approach to money isn't "spend as little as absolutely possible whenever possible" but as I said earlier, it has been "spend less on the things that don't matter to you so that you have money on the things that do". This is the essence of being mindful with your money. Paying attention to where your money is going, so you can mindfully and consciously make decisions about spending money that are in line with your values or what is important to you.

The example I give to people about things that I do that work for me is that I forage. I get free and reduced rack produce from the open air market. I make nearly everything from scratch. My husband and I build whatever we can by ourselves. We live without a car. We buy from the scratch and dent store. All of this is because these are things that don't bother us. Its not a burden for us to do these things. (And when I'm just unable to function because of depression, these are a burden for me and I don't do them.) Doing them allows us to save money, and then have extra to spend on things like gluten free food, healthier oils (I nearly exclusively use olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil, and sunflower oil), more natural sweeteners, (frugal) vacations abroad, home births, and yes, even new smartphones.

Other people live their frugality completely differently. They would never dream of buying past prime or reduced rack or scratch and dent items. They might have a car. But they don't spend money on gluten free items, or more expensive oils or sweeteners. They would never spend money on home births. And they may not spend money on vacations ever or might do them less frequently. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.

Yes, you need to be spending less money than what you're making. (And if that isn't possible without making yourself depressed, see what you can do to bring in more money.) But within that, there's so much flexibility. Mindfully spend your money. Be aware of where it is going; don't let it slip through your fingers. Do as Dave Ramsey says and give a name to every dollar. Budget. But do it in a way that reflects your values, and not someone else's. Don't let anyone tell you that you're "doing it wrong". It's none of anyone's business how you're spending your money other than yourself and your spouse and maybe your children.

So, dear lady that I met the other day in the line at the smoothie place, when I told you that I write a frugal living blog and you questioned what I was doing at a smoothie place then, this is why. Because what I'm spending is my choice. How I spend my money reflects my values, and yes, being able to pick up a delicious smoothie from a smoothie place makes me happy, and your happiness is important. If you don't take care of yourself, no one else will. Self care is important.

For those of you who've stuck around my blog from the beginning and have watched it evolve with time, I apologize if you're upset with the direction it is taking. But I need to be true to myself and my values, and my blog needs to reflect that.

And that's what I'm all about lately. Money mindfulness. I'm not perfect at it, which is why this is the pursuit of money mindfulness.

And if you think mindfulness is just this new age mumbo jumbo, I'm sorry. But let me recommend that you find a therapist who works doing mindfulness with people, and you might completely change your perspective, and find what a life changing skill it is.

What is your frugality style? What are the things that matter less to you, that you're willing to save money on, and what are the things that matter more to you and you're willing to spend money on them?
Have you ever felt that frugal living was really difficult? Were you able to admit it at the time, or just after got out of the situation? What did you do to change things?