We are the “thrifty couple.” How did we become know as this? Here is our history!
We have been married for 10 wonderful years! We have 4 children 6 and under! We currently live in Utah, and are originally from S.E. Idaho. We have been couponing for many years and always trying to find ways to creatively save money in every area of life as a couple. From the basic essentials of life needs to the fun “play” times, we have discovered that you can have the lifestyle that you want in a much more affordable fashion.
Many years ago, we decided that Thrifty Cas was going to stay home with our children. This presents itself to be a very big challenge in a two-income society! When our first child was born in January 2004, we realized very soon how much of a challenge this would be! We, as a couple and together, made efforts very quickly to cut our budget dramatically!
Where did we start first? We had a very quick realization that, in the first four years of our marriage, we were not wise spenders. We had gone into much debt for a young married couple! We needed a debt makeover! We were introduced to Dave Ramsey and his Financial Peace University! What a blessing – we immediately started this program and saw progress right away! However, we knew that at this pace, it would still take a while to get out of the rut we were in.
We had stopped spending on the fun things and had cut out expenses where we could, but we still needed to cut our everyday spending! We had gone from 2 incomes to 1 and a new baby! There just wasn’t enough to cover all of our expenses, it was going to be a slow debt relief process. Then, when our new baby was 4 months old – we discovered that we were expecting again and I was 2 months along – we were going to have another baby at the end of 2004! Two wonderful blessings in 1 year! It was exciting, but a scary reality as we still were struggling to make ends meet. This caused us to evaluate how we could cut the basics for living!
What more could we do other than buying generic everything, and mainly beans and rice! When our second child arrived, we were overflowing with blessings and emotions, but very concerned! We were spending about $600 a month for all of our groceries, household items, personal care items, and diapers! Everything we bought was generic, cheap – we thought!
We shopped this way for a whole year! We would use coupons when and where we could, but many things were still cheaper than the name brand with coupons! I didn’t know of a better way! Then, when our second child turned 1 year old, we discovered a serious issue – she had a very deadly peanut allergy! This changed our lifestyle dramatically! We had to start reading labels and discovered that nearly every generic item was not safe for our child! We had to buy name brand products! Our budget of $600 a month jumped quickly to over $800 a month! Then we really started using coupons because we had to!
It was a bit of a shock on our budget! What were we going to do, we could not spend this much every month! This is where our spending changed dramatically – before discovering the allergy, we thought we were doing the best we could – we stopped doing the things that were fun, we were buying super cheap and eating very cheaply. We really just didn’t know what more we could do!!!
This is what happened with the discovery of the allergy – we researched ways in which we could use coupons to really save us money – there had to be a way! We discovered many ways of truly using them, many websites that helped in this process. We found ways that worked, but cost money to use the resource, ways that were free, but didn’t work like we expected! After a year of trying many methods, I finally started going through the ads myself and matching up the coupons with the sale prices. This took me 4 or more hours a week – but we started seeing dramatic savings! It was well worth the time to invest to save that much money – we started saving 50% right off the top! Wow this new found freedom of having 50% more of our grocery budget! This was equal to several hundred a month. We could pay off our debt and this much faster of a rate!
Then our lives changed even more, how could we be doing a better job! This came with the discovery of an awesome website – it was FREE, EASY, QUICK and THOROUGH!
This awesome website is Grocery Smarts. They had everything that I was finding as a lack in previous websites! They had all of the stores, they had a complete coupon list, they had a method of coupon organization which took minutes instead of hours, and best of all it was FREE!
All of the sudden, I went from spending 4 hours every week to about 30 minutes! PLUS I started saving 65% of all of my groceries, household, toiletries, and diapers! We were spending $50 a week for a family of 4 with 2 in diapers! What a blessing! We were saving $400 a month, plus having many extra hours to spend with my family instead of ads and coupons!
This also became an eye-opener and life changer in every area of life. We started to realize that you can live life to the fullest at a discount!
Over the past four years, we have found ways to cut expenses from the basics of food, clothing and baby needs, to the fun stuff of travel, dates, activities and everything in between. We currently live and do the things we enjoy on a very measly budget. We currently are a family of 6 and have a budget of less than $300 a month for food, household, toiletries, diapers, and clothing – all of the basics and essentials. We are not only saving 65% or more but we are also eating better than we ever have – we have more room in our budget to eat fresher and healthier than we did at our $600 budget for a family of 4!
We have started this website with hopes and prayers that it will change other lives too! Either for those that have to cut their budgets to live and for those that want a better lifestyle. This website has money saving tips to cover every area of life, both nationally and here in our state of Utah! We have put together many things that we have learned and share those experiences and pray that your life might be blessed, enriched and changed by these things!
To enrich and change lives even more, in addition to this website, we teach FREE classes on saving money and starting with the basics and essentials of life. We teach you how to cut your grocery store budget by 50% or more! We teach these FREE Money-Saving Classes primarily in Utah. We also teach in the Las Vegas area. For more information on the classes that we teach and offer, please click here.
Thank you and have fun saving a ton!
Thrifty Al and Thrifty Cas
