November 19, 2019

Frugality Without Deprivation | Jen Smith from Modern Frugality

44 minutes

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Jen who co-hosts the Frugal Friends podcast and writes at Modern Frugality.

Jen really didn’t want to become frugal in her 20’s because she was afraid of losing out.

Over time she realized the amount of work it was taking to reach her goals was too much.

She decided to stop only focusing on more work and begin focusing on frugality.

Listen and learn all about side hustles and let us know what you think.

Episode Summary

The first thing her husband wanted to do after getting married was paying off student debt

Jen was not originally on board with this

She didn’t want to live under a rock under her 20’s

Her husband explained the opportunities that they’d have if they got out of debt

They were $78k in debt total

The two of them also didn’t have a ton of income

Jen came around to getting out of debt but still didn’t want to lower her income

She tried to add on three side hustles on top of her job

There was so much stress that she ended up with shingles

In totality between all their work and side hustles, they were bringing in up to $88k

Originally the goal was to be debt-free in 5 years

In the end, it turned out to only take 23 months

Jen’s Tools for Turning Around Her Finance

One of the most powerful tools she used was a method called habit stacking

This is where you take one habit you’re good at and sticking another on top

Hers was brushing teeth with budgeting tied in on it

Jen also really recommends manually tracking vs automated systems at first

Another tool Jen used was a no-spend challenge

This is where you don’t spend money on any non-critical item for a set period of time

Many times people shoot for a month

Saving money is good for you and the environment she also calls out

Buying cheap things that get tossed lead to waste

Cheap vs Frugal

Impacting someone else negatively is cheap

Impacting yourself negatively is cheap

If it’s illegal it’s cheap

If something takes you so much time to save money that you’re not there for someone else it’s cheap

Key Takeaways

Less is more: Jen actually became happier in life after stripping off unnecessary spending instead of it being a burden

Saving is self cafe: She talked about how so many of the things we spend money on take us away from things we really care about

Cheap is harmful: We discuss how being cheap is destructive to relationships and the environment

Call to Action

Assign a value on a scale of your choosing to the expenses in a certain category. Start reducing the ones you value least.

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Learn more about Jen

Via her podcast

One of her books -> Saving with Spunk, The No Spend Challenge, Meal Plan on a Budget

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By Cody Berman and Justin Taylor

4.8

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