Some people have asked me if I have been able to maintain my frugal and minimal lifestyle after having a baby. The answer is – absolutely YES! This is the best time to practice this lifestyle by proving that your child doesn’t need much either. Now, before you start to feel bad for my child because he may seem “deprived”, I assure you that’s not the case. My child doesn’t have an understanding of the value of money and what is a toy and isn’t. He is just as happy with a plastic spoon as compared to any other toy. Children find temporary happiness in toys but they definitely get bored of them quickly. This is why I do not have a lot of toys for my child.

Teaching your child that less is more is the plan. I’m more about adventures and the experiences to be had such as the aquarium, the zoo, etc. These are the things to live for and it’ll show your child that quality time is the best time. This is better than having to clean up tons of toys that are on the ground. Less toys means less picking up. I always pick up before I leave the baby room and it takes me less than 30 seconds. This helps with not cluttering the ground and room and you have a fresh start the next time you enter the room.

What Do I Have?

I always have the essentials for my baby and a few toys. I have a jumper that he is on once or maybe twice a week, we spend most of the day with motor and developmental skills. I have the minimum and I have no regrets.

What Don’t I Have?

I don’t have a mamaroo, a walker, a glider, a bassinet, a sit up seat, a toy pen, etc. for my child. Most of those items are not recommended by pediatricians and if I did, the babies grow out of them very quickly. 

This blog is not to shame anyone who has or doesn’t have any of those things, it’s just to show that we can do and are probably better off without them. Those things do nothing but bring clutter into our home and our mind. Always think: less is more!

Is this sustainable when they get older? The answer is always absolutely! Keep the toys to a minimum of 10-15 toys and if they buy a new one, they’ll have to donate one of the old ones to charity. It’s not about stripping toys away from children but allowing them to have a few toys and be happy with what they have or else they’ll always be wanting.

I have included photos of my baby room and what it all consists of. 

Yours Truly,

Melissa Lee

I’ve put together another list to help make extra income and how to save money.

1. Sell things that you no longer use/need/want.

When my husband and I were moving to our new home, we wanted to start fresh with everything. We sold our biggest items such as a guest bed, storage cubes, couches, computer desk, etc. to our smaller items such as kitchen and dinnerware. This started a fund for our new items that we would be purchasing for the new home. It also made moving way easier for us too since I was pregnant and unable to help.

When you need extra cash, look around your place for things to sell online and make some extra cash. They say another man’s trash is another man’s treasure and it’s true! I’m sure we all have plenty of items that we can get rid of and it also helps with decluttering your place. If you have enough items, you could even do a garage sale. This will bring in a little extra income and help you organize and declutter at the same time.

2. Turn off the TV on the weekdays.

My husband came up with this idea as he thought that we were just wasting away watching TV after work every day. We went to Barnes & Noble and got a book for each of us to read instead. This not only cuts down on our screen time and electricity, we were able to be in peace and tranquility in our home without many distractions. We are able to sit down at the table and have dinner together and converse. This has made quality time for us so much more meaningful!

3. Use only what you need.

This applies to anything and everything. I have a rule for toilet paper that if you are only doing a number one, use only 3 squares. Water usage is only to be turned on a small setting to wash your hands or dishes. Electricity is only to be turned on when it is needed. This might sound stingy but it’s actually preserving resources. Why leave the light on in the hallway if you’re just going to be in your room with the door closed? Why turn on the water all the way for it to spill all over the counter and make a mess? This creates more chaos and more work for you.

My husband and I live in a two-story home that is 2,600 square feet. Our water bill is an average of $45 a month! Can you believe that? Our electricity bill averages out to $95 a month. I think that number can be a little bit better and hopefully it will go down with us turning off the TV on the weekdays but we only try to use what we need. I know this can be difficult with bigger families but try to teach them how to preserve resources. It’s better for you and for the planet.

4. Make the most out of what you have.

For my dish soap, I do a ratio of 3/4 of soap and 1/4 of water in the glass dispenser. This has helped me make the most out of my dish soap because they’re both reliant on each other to work so why not combine the both? I haven’t seen a decrease in the quality of the soap usage either.

For cooking, I cook a bulk meal for dinner so that I have leftovers for lunch the next day – it’s breakfast for my husband. This helps us save on food and we don’t have to scramble to cook something for lunch or go out and buy food.

For my beauty regime, I wash my face while I am showering. I feel this is two birds with one stone because for some reason, when I am out of the shower, I don’t feel like going to the sink and doing it there. Don’t ask me why, I’ve just never liked doing it. Washing my face in the shower while the conditioner is in my hair helps me get my beauty regime done.

5. Look at where you can cut expenses.

We stopped purchasing bottled water years ago because my husband would leave them all over the house and I just couldn’t justify it anymore. We got a water filter for our refrigerator and I put water in a pitcher and that’s where we drink water from. This applies to us and all of our guests who come over. We set out a water pitcher with cups and coasters and this has cut down our use of plastic water bottles and clean up! We do have bottled water in our home but it’s only for emergencies such as hurricanes, pandemic, etc. Even when we travel, I fill a gallon water jug for us to use instead of water bottles. It’s just more eco-friendly and less wasteful.

I rarely ever drink coffee but I hear it’s one of the biggest expense for some people because they go to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts every day. That’s $5 a day for 365 days totaling $1,825! You could use that money for a vacation or to pay off a debt! Just know where your money is going.

To stay disciplined for a minimal and frugal lifestyle isn’t hard once you get used to it but the hardest part is getting into it. I know we have our normal routines and attachment to things but if we don’t get away from that, we will always be left with a lot of “stuff” that will only clutter our house and our minds. How your house looks like will affect how your mind will also look like. Let yourself go of all those material things and find freedom in the things that are in the experiences that life has to offer! I hope this list helps.

Sincerely,

Melissa Lee

I had a reader ask this great question while reading one of my blogs, “How do you stay frugal when it comes to hobbies, parties, gifts, etc.?” The whole point of being frugal and minimal is to not have more stuff, meaning material things, but to have more experiences. This is where you can splurge because this is something that you can make memories out of with yourself or loved ones. When it comes to vacations, my husband and I tend to spend more so that we can have a more fulfilling experience to remember for the rest of our lives instead of buying useless “souvenirs” to take up more space in our home and lives. The money that you save from not buying souvenirs can be used for a better dining experience, an excursion, or a hobby while vacationing.

This is the same when you attend parties, weddings, birthdays, and more. Frugality and minimalism teaches us to give more than we take. All the books and blogs that I’ve read all live by this rule. It makes absolute sense because when you give more than you take, that in itself is an experience. My husband and I always give 10% to either our church or a charity that we are passionate about.

Like I said in my other blog, don’t forget about all the fun while you’re staying or starting a frugal or minimal lifestyle. This process is to make your life more fulfilling, not boring and mundane. It’s not an overnight change so do not be discouraged as it took me a year to finally get it right.

Sincerely,

Melissa Lee

I am going to include some tips that I’ve found helpful from books and blogs.

1. Buy a new “used” car.

Do not buy a brand new car because you will be paying a high price. Instead, settle for a newer used car. For example in 2020, do not buy a 2020 car but instead purchase the same model a few years older such as 2015-2016. Not only will you be paying half the price tag but you will be saving tons! They always recommend to put some sort of down payment if you are unable to pay cash for the car.

2. Turn off the stove as your food is almost done.

This has helped me tremendously. This only works with electric stoves, sorry for my gas stove cookers.  When my food is almost done, I turn off the stove and let the remaining heat from the stove continue to cook my food. This allows for the stove to cool after I take the pot off and save on electricity! I love this hack and use it daily.

3. Use electricity at non-peak hours.

Did you know that you get charged differently on your electricity bill based off the hours that you use it? You are charged more when you use electricity the same time that the rest of the people use it. That’s because it takes more capacity to run more electricity when more people use it. If you are able to log into your electricity bill or view your bill, they will tell you the times when it costs more to use it and the times when it’s low use. When you are using electricity when it’s low, you are charged less and that means more savings!

During the day, I used as much natural lighting as I can. I open all the blinds and let that sun come in! It’s free lighting for your home. When it’s night time, I only open one light at a time. There’s no reason to have two or more lights on in the house if you’re just in one room. This works for my husband and I. I know it might be different for larger families but do what works best for you.

4. Buy quality, not quantity.

If you are buying a sweater, make sure it’s high quality so that it’ll last longer. Same thing with appliances and everything else. You will be spending more, yes, but your items will last longer. There’s no point in buying something cheap and having to replace that item over and over again. Frugal and minimalism isn’t about being as cheap as you can, it’s about being intentional as much as you can. The whole point is to save you money in the future, not just now. Don’t buy something just to get by but buy with the intention of it lasting throughout the years.

These are tips that I live by on the daily. I hope it helped! Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Melissa Lee

Credit card companies are always taking advantage of consumers but what happens when the consumer takes advantage of their credit cards? This is precisely what my husband and I did with our credit cards in 2016. We weren’t using our credit cards enough to feel like we were reaping the rewards to its fullest potential. We decided to charge everything to our cards that we could, this meant bills and all other shopping. The plan, of course, is to pay everything off within the month or else this process would be useless. If you are not careful enough with this technique, you can land yourself in some serious debt so please proceed cautiously. When you pay off the card every month, you are avoiding interest and reaping the rewards for free. Let me show you how it works.

1. Charge your credit card, only if it does not incur fees.

Certain vendors allow you to use your credit card but with processing fees. At this point, this isn’t an ideal situation to use your card because you will be paying more in fees than reaping the rewards. Example is paying your rent via credit card instead of ACH or debit but the processing fees are $25.00. Charge your cards at vendors who do not charge a fee such as the grocery store, certain bills, etc. You will reap 100% of your rewards, let the vendors pay the merchant credit card fees.

2. Pay back the amount owed each month to avoid interest.

My Capital One card’s current reward is 1.5% cash back on all purchases. However, my interest rate is 24.99%! See the difference if I do not pay off the card each month? The whole point of this process is to reap rewards and not pay a cent in interest. I’ve done it for the past 4 years so it’s definitely doable!

3. Use your rewards wisely.

Depending on what rewards your card offers, it’s easy to just get a gift card to Amazon or another vendor but if you are carrying a balance on your card, it is best to use your rewards to pay off your remaining balance instead. Hear me out, yes it’s your rewards and you decide ultimately how to use and spend them but why not pay your balance down so you can have more financial freedom while than buy more stuff? Wasn’t that what got us in this credit card debt mess in the first place? Once your balance is zero, your rewards are completely FREE for you to use at that time.

The most important step of this is to track your expenses on your card because if you do not, this could end up worse than where you started. The whole purpose of this is to use your credit card to your advantage. If you do not stay on top of it, you will end up in more debt so please proceed cautiously. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Best wishes to you all!

Sincerely,

Melissa Lee

In 2016, my husband and I decided to charge everything on credit to reap the rewards on our cards instead of using debit or ACH payments. Of course, we paid off the cards every month to avoid interest or else that would defeat the purpose of using them. We both had a full-time job each and he had a side business as well so the triple income was great. It’s true what they say that when you make more, you will spend more. This was surely the case for us and in 2018 that came and hit me like a bus! My Capital One card sends me an annual spending report of what I spend each year and splits them into categories for me. In 2018 alone, we spent over $40,000! That’s a salary in itself. I could not believe what I saw. This doesn’t even include my husband’s Chase card! I got concerned and reevaluated our spending. How we were able to spend that much and why that money did not go into savings instead? Most of it was eating out and buying stuff that was not needed. Our house was filled with junk and our savings was barely growing. We didn’t have 6 months saved up at all for emergencies. I knew it was time for a change.

The first step was to look at my budgeting. I’ve been using an expense sheet since 2016 and I put in the numbers for all the bills and spending but it didn’t faze me still how much we were spending. I then took the budgeting and asked where we can cancel services that we did not need and unnecessary spending. We canceled our local theme park annual passes because we only went 2 times a year if we got lucky. We looked at switching internet providers to get a better price for a better bundle. You bet that I looked at anything and everything.

2019 was the year that we were going to make a change, a very big one! I think I’ve read almost every frugal and minimalist blog out there to help me gain control of my situation. It definitely helped and my husband and I were on the same page on our spending and to grow our savings. These are the steps that we did to take back our situation and put us in the driver’s seat instead of letting our money control us.

1. Using one person’s salary to pay for bills while the other goes directly to savings.

Thanks to one of our young couple friends who shared this with us. It made so much sense! Why are we combining both salaries when we can just use one to pay for all the bills? Gratefully, my husband made enough to cover more than just the bills so any leftover, we used that money for our other spending such as groceries, etc. I pulled out the extra cash we had so that we did not use any more than what we had. It’s a great discipline for sure because when you’re out of money, you’re done!

2. Limit our eating out to only once a month.

This wasn’t hard to do but cooking up a meal every day was a bit of a task. I don’t like to meal prep because I like my food fresh so I cook up a new meal every day. I even did a menu calendar for the month and that seemed to help me a lot with my grocery shopping list and budget.

3. Buying food in bulk.

This didn’t make sense to my husband and I at first because it was just us two. We always bought our groceries just as we needed them. That proved to be a big mistake for our budget. We got a Sam’s Club membership and I can tell you that we have saved money! We froze the meat that we were not going to be eating and that has been a lifesaver. Your freezer will become your best friend in this frugal lifestyle!

4. Paying down our debt.

We paid everything off besides our school loans and for me, I would die before they collected all my money from me. That was obviously bad thinking and most certainly dangerous because the interest I was paying on these loans would have already given them more than what I owed long before I was dead! It was time to get thinking on financial freedom. We didn’t do this until 2020. We tripled my husband’s school loan payment from $125 to $500 a month. With the projected payoff date, we will pay it off in a year. Once we are done paying his school loan off, we then take that $500 and add it to my school loan payment and within a year, that too will be paid off. That would mean no more debt and we can use all that extra money for other bills and things! It was very exciting just to think about and that we can achieve that in two years! This is what Dave Ramsey calls the “snowball effect”. He is very great to listen to when it comes to money, give him a listen!

5. PURGE, DECLUTTER, and ORGANIZE.

A lot of the steps above are geared more towards frugal than minimalism but this step is definitely minimalism. I got real with myself and all the items that I owned. Did they really bring me joy or was I just a hoarder? Our home was filled with so many things, no wonder our lives always seemed so busy. Our house played a huge role in that with all the items that we owned. How can you have peace and tranquility in your home when your house is cluttered with things that you don’t even use but just want? I gave myself a pep talk and got straight to it. First was my closet, it was no longer fun to have a “mall” in my closet. In total, after 2-3 purges, I can say I donated about 7-8 bags of clothes! It was so liberating and to see the fruits of my labor in my closet was all worth it. I now have gone from using four closets to just one. It is truly an amazing feeling. That was probably the bulk of it all, I tell you so once you get past that, everything else seems to go smoothly. We also donated a lot of our household items to our church yard sale and it was beneficial for my home and for my church. It’s so easy now for me to not purchase something because I “want” it. It’s been months since I’ve last gone shopping and bought anything. It’s actually harder for me to buy something than to not buy something because I ask myself if it will bring joy or clutter to my home. A good method to use on when to purge things is: have I used this in the past 90 days and/or will I use this in the next 90 days? If the answer is no to any of those questions, purge!

6. Remove all disposables and plastic to go eco-friendly.

One of our friends asked us if we recycle, I used to laugh it off and say, “no way”. It is embarrassing for me now to even think back on when I said that because it meant I didn’t have any regard to the Earth and that I didn’t care that I was being so wasteful. I started recycling all the plastic and metal in our home and started using a recycle bin. The things that couldn’t be recycled, I found other places and resources to donate to. One time use plastic and things no longer have a place in my home. My husband and I bought reusable grocery bags and put them in our trunks. We leave the store with no plastic bags or storage of any kind to hold our items. After all, it was just temporary storage. We try to buy consciously in regard to waste of any kind. This has improved our lives so much and it feels so great to be part of making a difference in the world. We live strictly by these rules so we can have a better Earth tomorrow.

7. What do we do differently now?

In regards to our credit cards, we use my Capital One card for all the bills such as internet, utilities, etc. and we use my husband’s card to all other spending. We feel this is more doable as you get to see how you spend on what you need versus what you want. When my 2019 Capital One annual spending report came, I was so happy to see that we cut 2018’s spending in half by spending $19,000. We still need to work on that number but we know it all went strictly to bills.

Tips that helped me:

1. Internet 

I used to think that getting spam in our mailbox was bad but it wasn’t so bad after all. I would get ads from surrounding local internet service providers and I would use that as leverage with my current internet service provider and it seemed to work every time when I would call them and complain that my bill was too high. Sometimes I would even threaten leaving them for another service provider. They would knock off $10-$15 a month for a whole year and give me higher internet speed! I would have to call in again once that expired after a year or two but I say it’s definitely worth the efforts that is put into it!

2. Utilities

My husband and I were a bit torn on this because he didn’t think we needed to go lighter on our water and electricity usage. It took some convincing but he came onboard and we now open our window blinds for natural lighting until the sun goes down. We only use one light at a time to conserve energy and electricity. It has cut down our electricity bill by more than half! We also set our A/C to 76 during working hours and then to 74 when we go to bed at 10pm. It goes back up to 76 when we wake up at 6am. Our water usage has gotten better, I don’t turn the water faucet all the way up anymore. I do it just enough to get water for what I need and then turn it off. My husband has a habit of turning the faucet all the way up and water gets everywhere so we still need to work on that a bit. We need warm water for our Waterpik flosser so he gets it when I’m in the shower and fills it up for me too while I’m still in the shower. It helps save water by not turning on the faucet until it’s warm enough to collect.

3. Go to sleep early and wake up early.

We go to sleep early and wake up early. The early bird surely gets the worm! You feel more revived and less rushed. I used to get up and have just enough time to get ready and run out the door for work. I no longer do that now that I have more time in the morning to spend with my husband and dogs. There is no rush and my day is much calmer to start with. How you start your mornings is usually how the rest of your day goes. Take some time to appreciate life, your loved ones and start your day with a peaceful mind. Just to give you an idea of our sleep and wake up schedule, we try to sleep at 9pm-10pm and wake up at 6am-7am. Do what works for you and see if that changes anything in your daily life and schedule.

Most importantly, have fun and enjoy yourself. Don’t get too caught up in the process and forget about all the fun to be had. These are just some things that helped my husband and I live a more fulfilling lifestyle and save money for our new home. I hope this helped you, even if it’s just a little bit that you took away from this and feel free to share with family and friends.

Sincerely,

Melissa Lee