I get so many wonderful, encouraging emails from many of you. It’s always inspiring to hear your stories of living frugally and how it has made a difference in your lives.
I just thought I would share this story from Kim in hopes it might encourage and inspire you as it did me:
2009 was a tough year for my family. While we had planned financially for the birth of my son, we hadn’t planned on complications during pregnancy that resulted in my two-month hospitalization away from our home town, extensive medical bills and NICU stay and a 180-mile daily round trip commute for my husband between home, work and the hospital.
Just as we got baby healthy and home, we had another blow: My husband was laid off with no notice right as I was scheduled to go back to work from maternity leave. He qualified for unemployment, but the difference in income from his paycheck was a big one, and we now had lots of expenses from this latest addition to our family.
That was the day I first did a Google search for “coupons” in attempt to find ideas to help stretch our budget and our lives changed dramatically. I always thought because I have a “good” job, that I didn’t need to use coupons because I wasn’t in dire straights. Little did I know that coupons are not only used by those in many different income brackets, but that there is enormous savings potential if you just become an informed shopper.
The $20-$30 a week I was hoping to save quickly turned in hundreds of dollars a month and more. Our family not only learned to survive on less – but to thrive on it. We were able to afford for my husband to be a stay-at-home dad for a year to our preemie son, giving our little guy a chance to get bigger and stronger with lots of personal attention from dad.
We were also surprisingly able to live a more comfortable lifestyle. Even while watching our spending, we were still able to buy everything we needed, and still had room in our budget for growing our savings, starting college funds for the kids and even for extras like vacations. Using coupons and being smart about our shopping has helped our family be in better financial situation than ever before, and earlier this year, we were even able to pay $5000 cash for a new roof for our house.
My husband is back to work, and my son is now strong and healthy, but we’re still continuing our savings efforts for the better of our family. My husband and I feel it is important to share our good fortune, and our savings efforts have enabled us to be able to generously share with others. We love taking large care packages of our deals to family and friends, and we have also been able to make regular donations to our children’s school, the local food pantry and more.
We’ve had so many people ask us for advice and information, we have even started a blog to share local deals with our own community. It’s great hearing from readers who are now saving money and able to better make ends meet because of information we shared.
-Kim from 2 Kids and a Coupon