Nor does my debt define me. Often times when we’re struggling with debt, it feels like it consumes our lives. I know that often times I spend way too many hours researching additional side hustles, scrutinizing our budget, or researching ways to cut costs more. But there comes a point during a debt payoff journey that we must realize that our debt is not who we are, nor does it make us a bad person. Read more
Happy Monday, friends!! In our efforts to add more homesteading posts into our repertoire, we’re going to start out this week with a post on some of the uses of Epsom Salt. The Epsom Salt Council (who knew?) tells us that “Epsom salt is made up of naturally occurring minerals magnesium and sulfate”. For those of you not familiar with the health benefits of magnesium, or, rather, the dangers to our health of a lack of magnesium, they are many. A lack of magnesium is associated with: Read more
I’m half Irish, and I remember vividly while growing up that my dad would take off work every St. Patty’s Day, get dressed up in all sorts of green, buttons and the works, and head down to the local St. Patricks Day parade to party with brothers, cousins and friends. Us kids being little, we stayed at home with mom, who had no interest in partaking in such “foolhardiness”. 🙂 Read more
In our quest for an ever-smaller grocery bill, we are constantly on the lookout for ways to save money on groceries. We’re now managing to feed our family of six for around $400 a month. Yeah, some families do it for cheaper, but we’re trying to balance saving money while still eating things other than beans and rice, so our journey to a lower food bill is going a bit slower than other people’s. 🙂 Here are some of our latest and greatest money saving grocery tips:
If you’re a big believer in having extra food on hand, “just in case”, we’re with you. Different people have different ideas about how long to stock up for, what to stock, and where to store it. Some are fine with a three-day supply of food and water, others save for a year or even longer. Either way, it’s important to be prepared for at least “minor” emergencies, such as storms that may keep you housebound or without power for a few days. Then the question becomes: what do you store? After a few years now of experimenting with different plans for our food arsensal, we have kind of a “go-to” basics list of things we always like to have on hand.
We’re a big fan of delicious-tasting easy and cheap meals here at The Frugal Farmer. Keeping the grocery budget around $400 a month for our family of six takes some work, so we always take note when we find great meals that cost under $5. Here are some of our favorites: 
Beans and Rice Read more
If you’ve been reading The Frugal Farmer for any amount of time, ya’ll know that we’re on a super tight budget. We’ve learned how to cut expenses enough to manage our income and our high DTI well, but the things that really get us are those one-time expenses: the occasional doc bill, vet bill, or home or auto repair/maintenance bill. Since our budget is still pretty tight, there’s not really enough room in it to put cash aside for those one-time expenses yet, so we work in other ways to try and find ways to budget for them, as we no longer use credit cards. Here are some things we’ve learned about how to handle those one-time expenses: Read more
One of our goals in moving to our hobby farm a year and a half ago was to increase our level of self-sufficiency. Most of you know that self-sufficiency means being able to provide for yourself, but what does that mean, in detail, to our family? Read more
Does other people’s success ever stop you from achieving your goals? We were reminded the other day of a time when we let this happen to us. It all started with a post over at Out of Your Rut. Kevin wrote an article about the dangers of The Brady Bunch, and the memories came flooding back. It was 2012, and we were in the throes of realizing that we were in way too deep concerning our debt. But of course, that didn’t stop us from buying seasons 1 and 2 of The Brady Bunch for the kids. We’re always looking for “healthy” TV shows for the kids; ones with not too much violence, illicit encounters or other garbage that don’t do much good for either kids or adults.
However, the Brady Bunch didn’t do too much good for me, either. Read more
Well, friends, here it is Valentine’s Day. Whether or not you celebrate this “holiday”, I do have to admit it does make me think about all of the wonderful people we have in our lives. Over the past year, the readers, commenters and writers in the PF blogging world have really come to mean a lot to both Rick and I, even if he is largely silent on the subject. 🙂 Read more
