Festival Of Frugality

The Frugal Gump edition of the Festival of Frugality is up at Budgets Are Sexy (awesome movie = great theme!)

Here’s a sweet post about how acne is like credit card debt. Quite the visual images conjured up here, imagining people rubbing pizza on their faces… I am happily in the phase I section here – no pizza rubbing in the FB household.

Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme has a post about what he pays for health care. I do a lot of the same things (except the eating once a day thing – I’m all about breakfast…. and lunch and dinner!) and have a pretty similar result. I had a cold in 2005, and that was the last time I was sick. It would have to be a pretty extreme situation for me to take medicine for anything (ie, life or death, or pain significantly worse than childbirth). I’m very convinced that our lifestyle has a lot to to with why we don’t get sick. Even working in a public library with hundreds of sick children running around all winter, I managed to escape unscathed for the last several years in a row. We have a high deductible HSA health insurance policy, so if we did go to the doctor, we’d be paying for it ourselves. So a healthy lifestyle is not only good for our health, it’s good for our bank account.

I liked the post from Stop the Ride about a frugal family vacation in NC. My husband and I have tended to take far-flung vacations over the years we’ve been together, but this year with a baby in tow, we’re going to be staying much closer to home. I love the description of a very full vacation in a place that people don’t tend to think of when they imagine a vacation destination.

I loved this post about a frugal birthday party. Over the years I’ve been hearing more and more parents talking about extravagant parties for two and three year olds. Huge gatherings at expensive venues, tons of rented play equipment, catered food… it seems like insanity to me. Now that we have a little one of our own, birthdays will start in about ten months. My plan is to keep it simple, old-fashioned, and fun. Don’t kids prefer to play with the wrapping paper anyway?

This post about frugal baby toys wasn’t in the festival, but I got there on a link from an article that was, and I loved the idea of giving a baby a paintbrush and water to ‘paint’ the sidewalk with water. I can already see this in our little guy’s future.

As for another full-blown Depression, I agree that would be a bad thing. But a little wake-up call about our hyper-consumerism, waste, and keep-up-with-the-jonses lifestyle would be a good thing. If we switched to smaller cars, drove a lot less, made do with what we have, ignored commercials, and learned to be more self-sufficient, most of us would be in a better place than we are today. And if it encourages people to do things like start a recession victory garden, that’s a good thing too.