My wife Molly and I couldn’t wait to get married.
Just six weeks after graduating from college, we tied the knot and embarked on the greatest adventure of our lives as a 22-year-old and a 21-year-old.
Our first challenge: paying off nearly $70,000 in student loans between the two of us.
If you know me personally, I can get passionate about things. In fact, my sister once said that I don’t have hobbies—I have obsessions. So naturally, I didn’t want to chip away at this debt, I wanted to tear it to pieces.
Within two years, and with many material sacrifices, we paid off every last dime of that debt. In the first year, Molly didn’t even have a full-time job, so much of our savings came down to straight-up frugal-living grit.
I recently spent some time thinking back to those early years—now over a decade ago—and reflecting on what we did that made the biggest difference.
9 Frugal Living Tips
My best tips for young, married couples include being willing to adopt some extreme habits.
1. Rarely Eat Out, and When You Do, Be Strategic
Eating out is one of my weaknesses. When you’re tired, lazy, or just feeling like mixing things up, it’s so tempting to jump in the car and get that reward. However, your food budget is one of the most controllable ways to save money.
In our first year, we rarely ate out, and when we did, we’d do something simple like share an appetizer or get Italian ices. Occasionally, we’d pick a couple of items off the dollar menu at McDonald’s just for a little fun.
Those strategies might seem pretty boring if you’re used to eating out at nice places, but we weren’t used to that, and so anything we did seemed like fun.
2. Pay Down Your Debt in Big, Satisfying Chunks
One of the biggest challenges of frugal living is psychological. In our wealthy society, we’re used to using money as a pick-me-up or an emotional crutch. Mollie and I found it crucial to turn the tables and use our progress to keep our motivation high.
Instead of paying it down in a constant trickle, we would let it build up in our checking account and then pay off a nice, big round number every so often—$3,000 one time, or $4,000 another. We’d be so excited for those big payment days, and watching our debt drop in a satisfying way.
3. Find a Few Enjoyable Cheap Meals
As I mentioned earlier, we discovered that food was the largest non-fixed-budget category we could control. So, we focused on finding cheap meals we liked eating and then just kept eating them until we didn’t like them anymore, or pretty close!
Our go-tos were baked ziti and tuna noodle casserole. I know—carb-heavy—but the rest of our diet was fairly balanced. Eating healthy doesn’t have to be expensive, especially when you keep it simple.
4. Maximize Friend Time—the Cheapest Fun There Is
What would we have done in those early years without finding awesome friends? We quickly joined a church after getting married and were fortunate to connect instantly with some other newlyweds who lived nearby.
We spent many evenings with our new friends hanging out, playing games, cooking each other meals, and just doing life together. All of it was virtually free but made us feel as rich as royalty.
5. Resist Non-Essential Spending Until After a Milestone
You can’t delay buying new clothes, furniture, and other essentials forever. However, compared to the average American couple, we found you can push it a lot further than most.
Instead of annual seasonal shopping trips to update our wardrobes, we only bought clothes when an essential item wore out, or when we reached a major milestone in paying off our debt. You can’t get carried away by these little rewards, or you’ll find they destroy your momentum, but they really are a small thing to look forward to along the way.
6. Mooch Off Your Local Library for Fun and Entertainment
We look back fondly on our nearly daily trip to the library. Why daily? That’s easy—we decided not to get on the internet at home our first year of marriage to save money, and so we’d walk to the library to check emails. Yes, that sounds a little crazy today, but not having the internet or smartphones was an amazing blessing for our first year.
While at the library, we would also pick up books and movies, which pretty much covered all the at-home entertainment we needed—all free of charge as long as you return them on time.
7. Get Creative With Gift Giving
With our budget as tight as it was, you can imagine we had no room for gift-shopping—not a problem though. One, Molly and I were on the same page about it, and two, we were both creative enough to come up with other ways to show our affection.
Our creative “gifting” ran the gamut from cooking a favorite dinner, at-home date nights, massages, and hand-written letters.
8. Call Yourself a Minimalist
Make frugality an identity. In college, I had a blog I called “The Art of Minimalism,” so it was natural for me to extend that mindset toward the frugal living of our first few years of marriage. My wife, while not quite as enthusiastic as I was, was still up for the challenge and excited by our shared sense of purpose.
We drew a lot of inspiration from reading other minimalist-living blogs during that period—at the library, of course—and I believe measuring up to our ideals was a key reason we stayed motivated for as long as we did.
9. Equalize Indoor/Outdoor Temperature at Home
Granted, this one is kind of crazy, but for large parts of the year, the temperature inside our house was highly correlated with the temperature outside. In the winter, we wouldn’t turn on our heat until it dipped into the 50s inside, and in the summer, there were definitely times when it reached 90 degrees in our home.
I vividly remember the feeling of walking up the steps to our second-floor apartment and feeling the temperature rise with each step. Sometimes I would be sweating before even reaching our floor.
Looking back, I’m quite proud of our frugal living. Instead of waiting until we were financially secure to get married, we leaped into building a life together and making it work. The experience drew us together, and with any luck, will be part of the memories we cherish in our old age.