Guest Post: Avoiding Frugal Burnout

Today, we’re grateful to Kristie from This Side of Eternity for sharing her tips on sticking with the frugal life! Kristie is a homeschooling mom who is saving dollars and sense with all the best deals, coupons, freebies, and ideas she can find on This Side of Eternity.

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I have suffered from frugal burnout on more than one occasion, and only recently have I gotten a clue as to how to avoid it. There are several small things that we can do to avoid frugal burnout. And I will touch on some of them in this article. However, I believe that the biggest way to avoid it altogether is by not allowing it to master you.

What does that mean exactly?

Well, it seems like a natural thing for most people starting off on the road to becoming more frugal minded to see it as an all or nothing situation. This leads to feeling defeated if we buy anything without a coupon or if we go over budget.

Learning to be more frugal in all areas of your life is something that you get better at naturally over time. But sometimes we want to force the process and that is what leads to frugal burnout. In the worst case scenario, this could cause us to throw away our frugal ways in order to avoid the feeling of failure.

Burnout: Exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.

Have you ever felt this way? Becoming a frugal person should not become a burden. And we have to be willing to accept the fact that we aren’t always going to get it right. But you can’t fail if you don’t quit!

When you finally come to grips with the fact that it is about striving to be more frugal by changing your mindsets, then the possibility of being caught in the burnout trap will disappear.

I did say I would give you some tips to avoid frugal burnout, so here they are.

1. Stay Organized. This is important since cutting coupons and preparing shopping trips is already a tedious job, you don’t want it to become any more overwhelming than necessary which is exactly what will happen when you let your coupons stack up & get disorganized.
2. Allow Wiggle Room. Going over budget is one of those things that can make a frugal person feel as though their efforts were in vain. But if you set aside 10% of our budget for those special sales that pop up, you’ll be less likely to go over budget.
3. Realize that this is a process. You aren’t always going to get it right. And you may need to take a week off now and then. And that is perfectly alright. Give yourself permission to mess up and learn from those situations.

The single most important piece of advice I can give you is don’t give up!

Like I said earlier, you can’t fail if you don’t quit, so don’t quit.

Read all of my money saving tips at This Side of Eternity. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook.