Creativity Over Consumerism w/ Miranda Anderson

Live Free Creative. Yeah, it's just so beautiful. Definitely a different perspective than I think we've ever highlighted on this show before, and I think that's reflective of who Miranda is and the unique perspective that she does. But really really looking forward to sharing this with you all. Yeah, creativity is something we talk about a lot, but we've never dove into it like we did in this episode.

And it's not just like we kind of dived into dove into both sides of creativity, So like creativity from as a creative person and then also creativity even if you don't consider yourself very creative, but how to stretch that muscle that we all have and we kind of all desire through frugality. So it's I think everybody should listen to this episode. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by our two Frugal Living Summit.

Uh So, if you were not with us last year, um, we did a virtual summit last year and we were doing another one this year. The theme for this year is the Spending Symposium. It is a free, virtual four day event June will be sharing twenty yes to zero never before heard interviews with experts, diving deep into why we spend impulsively, how to stop, how to spend our

money better. So if you want help controlling your impulsive spending, feeling less guilt about spending in your budget or spending wisely on investments, then registration for the Spending Symposium is

now open. And did I mentioned completely free? So and today through Sunday we're actually offering an early bird pricing on the Spending Mastery Bundle, which you will be able to see after you register and includes all summit recordings and over sixteen workbooks, e books, courses, etcetera from our expert speakers. So head to Frugal Living summit dot com to get your free ticket and do not miss out on this amazing early bird deal on the Spending Mastery bundle.

So excited for this. It's turning into our annual summer virtual party where we kind of make it a little bit productive too, and it's it is It is virtual Summer Camp for free vitual. Yeah, that'll be next year summer camp Summer camp theme. Yes, I know. If you want a few other episodes to cue after this one that are kind of in the same vein, then definitely que up Episode one eighteen, which is tips for creating

a capsule wardrobe. Miranda talks a little bit about that in the episode, and then also episode one how to avoid Impulse Spending, because I think you're going to want to listen to both of those after you hear this episode. Let's get into it, Miranda, Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Oh, we are thrilled to have you because we love interviews. It's our favorite and we're just gonna jump right in. You've got so much to share with

us in perspective, and so let's get to it. Miranda can you tell us just a little bit about yourself, your family, and how you then decided to do a twelvemonth no shopping challenge? Sure? So, I am Miranda Anderson. I'm a mom of three. My kids are now almost thirteen, almost eleven, and eight. I have one lovely husband, two dogs, to cats, six chickens. I now live in Richmond, Virginia. But when we did the shopping challenge back in two

thousand seventeen, we were living in Austin, Texas. And I feel like, maybe, like a lot of your listeners who get, you know, find their way to this podcast, maybe recognize at some point that they're running on a treadmill that doesn't seem to ever shut off. I was, you know, a young mom. I had a great job, My husband

had a good job. We had just gotten out of school and bought a big house with a big yard, and felt like we were finally like doing it, checking all those boxes for like adulthood and success and and I got a minivan, and I now had like rooms that I didn't have enough furniture for, and I was doing all the things that I was supposed to do

in order to feel fulfilled, content, successful, happy, joyful. And while I felt those things sometimes and you know a lot of the time, they didn't stem from what from my circumstances, didn't stem from my house, from my shoes, from my closet. They stemmed from experiences and from my family and from these small moments. And yet most of my time and energy and money was spent on things meant to make my life better. And I had kind of this aha moment. I have been a I've been

online for a long time. I was an o G blogger. I started a blog in two thousand and seven. It was a hobby for many years, and around a couple of years before are No Shopping Challenge, I had converted my blog into my job and quit my other full time job, and so I was blogging full time and

the way that I was making money was through sponsorships. Ironically, one of the third party sponsors that I had was for an organization store, and my brief was too I was going to do a whole blog post about how to organize my kitchen cabinets, and so I had a budget of five dollars to go to this store and buy baskets and bins and caddies and everything you can imagine. And now there's this really popular Netflix show right where

they come out with all the stuff. So that was me ten years ago, right, come out with all this stuff.

And I got into my kitchen and I started pulling things out of my kitchen cabinets and realized I had just spent all of this money and brought these bags of the into my home in order to organize the stuff that I didn't even remember that I had that was buried in these kitchen cabinets, just clutter, random junk, male stuff that I like, party supplies that I had bought for a party that I hadn't yet hosted, and so they were yet unused, even though it had been

over a year. Just I had all this stuff and yet I was just adding to it, and I it was like the light switch turned on and I recognized that the habits were not aligned with my values and that I was that I was just that there wasn't really a purpose to the kind of keeping up with the Jones is, keeping up with the Pinterest board. And so that was kind of my moment of I don't think that I want to keep doing this. This isn't working.

What else could we do? And um, I had just watched a documentary about minimalism, and one of the things that I while I found the whole thing highly unrelatable, one of the pieces that I really liked was to use what you had, just use the things that you already have. And so I discussed with my husband this idea using the things that we already had and not adding to it for the next year. It was January, so it was convenient timing to think, like, oh, New

Year's resolution, and he was on board. So we embarked on our challenge. What an amazing timeline and journey. I mean, first of all, Wow to your family, Rundown, and I love that you specified just one husband in that whole mind. Yes, that was a very important thing for me to hear.

Sobering image that I feel I can relate to of going out and getting all of the things, bringing them back into your home, Like I feel like I can picture you with the excitement, and I think I hear so many people say, oh, wouldn't it just be so great to have tons of money to just go and get all the pre any containers, And you actually had it, You did it. You had five hundred dollars to spend, which would be a lot of people's dream to go do that, and then you come back with bags and

bags and bags. Just the image feels seared into my mind right now. And then that realization, like I'm with you in that aha moment of I just brought stuff to manage stuff, to keep cleaning my stuff and doing stuff with my stuff. Holy things. But then, what I think is really interesting about your story, Miranda, is how that realization led you to a twelvemonth no shopping challenge. I feel like some people could realize that and be like, isn't that funny? I bought stuff to manage my stuff,

and then they move on. But you you didn't even go to a one month challenge. You did the whole twelvemonth thing. So how did how did that come about? How did you get like your dog, six cats, one husband, four children on board with this. Yeah, so at the time it was just one dog along with the children, um and the husband. Uh so then the chickens have alway, The chickens are on board for anything any time. They're savages,

but they're chilled. So you know, it's so funny because I don't know that I ever even considered that like doing something shorter than a year, and it was probably the hype of being close to the beginning of the year. If I'm being totally honest, like I I've never really thought like, why didn't we do one months or three months? Like I think I was kind of looking for as I always am. I'm always fairly goal oriented, and I like the idea of progress, and like I like a project.

I like thinking like what am I going to be tackling this year? What am I looking forward to? So I think because of timing, that's what lent to this idea of a one year challenge, because it just made sense. It was January, let's do this for a year, I think. Um. The other thing is that that's a model that I've seen in a lot of books and you know, like Love and the Happiness Project by Gretching Rubin. That's, you know,

this one year challenge. I had seen other people, do you know, challenges of different sorts for a year, leaving that you know, turning off their phones for a year or not using the internet for a year, or living in an RV for a year. You know, So it just kind of made sense. I guess I was lucky that my husband was. I mean, at the time, he was home a lot less. He was working a ton at his job, and so I did most of the shopping anyway, So he was like, great, you don't want

to shop for a year? Sounds good to me, I mean, I think to him, it was just like, yeah, like, how could I say no to this? My kids were young enough as well that they didn't have Like we sat him down and had a family conversation about it. I remember saying, when you like, for for a while, you know, until next January, until after Christmas next year, we're not going to buy any new toys when we go to the store, and we're just going to use

the ones that we already have. So if you want a toy and we aren't going to buy a new one, can you think of anything that you could do? And my you know, at the time five year old, was like, well, we could make a toy. I'm like, yeah, we totally could make a toy. These are my kids that we take them on hikes and they're like playing with rocks and sticks anyway, you know, So I'm like, yeah, we

could totally make a toy. And also I'm a crafter I had been a d I y blogger, and so I have a craft room full of stuff, and we you know, on odd days we'd go in and just pull out scraps and make stuff anyway, so making things was not an unusual idea. So it didn't feel like we were on an island. It was like, well, we

have a house full of stuff. I think the other thing, too, was that I was I had just organized these cabinets and made them very beautiful with my worth of containers, and I was super conscious of how many things I had in the walls of my house that I hadn't even been thinking about. We had lived in that house at that point for about three years and um three and a half years maybe, and I had kitchen cabinets full of things. I had a ntry full of things.

I had a home office full of stuff. My kids closets were full of stuff, my own closet was full of stuff. I had a craft room full of stuff. We had a garage that we didn't park our car in, as many people can relate to. So I think I did a quick walk through and was like what am I buying? Anyway? Like, what are the things that I'm continually adding to our lives on like a weekly basis, a target run here, or a quick online click of the mouse. They're like, what what is this? Where is

it all going? And why do I need it? And so I think it was different than if we really like had nothing or the bare minimum and was like, oh, we're not going to buy anymore, but we actually don't have any clothes to wear like we we had plenty, as I assume most people. I don't know, most people probably do right, like have enough, and it's just about deciding that what you have is enough rather than deciding

that it isn't. Yeah, I And the whole time you're like talking, I'm thinking of the show that you mentioned earlier where they're just organizing all the stuff, and how I thought I was gonna love that show, and it only gave me anxiety, Like why are you holding onto it? Why do you need to organize it and just shuffle it around. It's like when you consolidate debts and it's like you think you're doing something, but you're you're you

still have the same amount of debt. You haven't done anything to it except put it in one payment, which for some people makes sense. But like, no, it just that show gave me so much anxiety. It's yeah, it's really don't like make things pretty for a while, because right like, once you start using things then they probably

aren't pretty anymore. It's kind of like the beginning of a of a dinner buffet, like and all you can eat restaurant, Like it looks really good until one person passes through that line and after that it's over, right. But the difference between that and actually digging in and deciding what your values are, what matters most to you, how want to spend your time, money, and energy, and then aligning the choices that you make with those things.

And for us, it started with a pause with this we believe that we have enough, We're going to just make that decision straight off. And it was an experiment. I never went into it thinking like for sure, no matter what, we're not going to buy anything. I said, we're gonna try this. We're gonna try to not acquire any new things for the year and see what happens, and maybe we'll go six months and realize that it

doesn't work. You know that we do absolutely need more clothes or whatever, but we're gonna try and see, and I was overwhelmed by how simple it became once I got through the initial discomfort of walking into a store and then walking out with just groceres, like just like food and like, you know, go buy groceries at Target. You always come home with a couple of things from the dollar spot and like that cute mug that was on the end cap and you know, just coming home

with just like milk and eggs and grapes. I was like, this feels a little weird, and it didn't even brows to see what else I might want, and then it pretty soon became my norm, and it was so much easier than I expected that it would be. Yeah, it does take that like decision making process out of the equation, because you can make your meal plan, you can make your list, but when you go in there and you're just browsing in quotations, like it always could be that

you end up bringing something home impulsively. But when you're doing some kind of challenge, which is why we love challenges, and you make the decision to say no to everything or to the things you've already decided on saying no to, it takes that question out so that you don't even are not even tempted to go brows. It's not even an option to look at what you could buy, which really cuts down on like the decision fatigue, because we that's when we're tired from making all the decisions is

when we make the bad ones. So that's what I love about the challenges. Yeah, So for your challenge specifically, what did it entail? Like I heard you said you bought groceries. What were kind of some of the specific rules for you. Yeah, So, our our guidelines were that we weren't going to acquire non consumable goods and so on. Our kind of outline list that looked like clothes, shoes, furniture, technology, books, toys, recreational equipment, decorations, and anything that wouldn't be used up

to completion. We also put like a little caveat in there for like body lotions and perfume and makeup and things like that that are technically consumable items. But if I had them already that I that weren't used up, then I had to use them up before I bought new ones, just to not like for me, it was an exercise in if I feel like shopping, am I that like go you know, kind of create a loophole into the non consumables. And so I just said, I'm

just gonna blanket if I have enough shampoo. You know, I'm not going to buy new shampoo until I'm like a couple of days out from until I'm putting water in the bottle type of thing, you know. But we could buy food, of course. Um, we bought like printer paper when the printer ran out of paper and ink, which it did, of course, because printers always run out

of ink right when you need them. Replacing light bulbs, replacing like you know, filters for um, for the for the car and for the house, basic maintenance stuff, and then when something broke, like if something broke, we could

replace it. And also because we lived in Texas, we had kind of a unique situation where it's a fairly seasonless wardrobe, as I imagine it is where you all live in Florida, where you you know, you toss a light sweater over something in the winter, but other than that, like it's you can kind of wear similar things year round. And so that was true for us and for my kids.

I knew, you know, when you have young and I'm always buying things like a little big anyway, So I thought, you know, they're going to make it through the end of the year with this stuff except for shoes. And so we made also the kind of caveat that when they grew out of a pair of shoes, that we could replace them for a similar pair. And sure enough, like within a month or two of beginning the challenge, my middle sent threw out of his cowboy boots. We

lived in Texas. You cannot be without a pair of cowboys, and he had walked through them like a hole in the bottom of them. They were his like daily shoes were made for walking daily shoe. Yes, okay, oh man, if you respected that, five year olds walking around in their boots. I mean, it's the cutest thing ever. So he re upped them. We got him a pair of bigger cowboy boots so he can continue on. Yes, man, man, that's amazing. And of course everyone has to decide what

they're gonna do, what's gonna work for them. I mean, this all sounds very realistic and probably what it produced in all of you, just that creativity and problem solving and all of that. But speaking of you are definitely obviously quite creative. You've already mentioned a craft room that you had, and your kids talking about making their own toys,

and and then and passionate about creating. How do you balance or blend or find the intersection between what could be perceived as like opposing energies of creating and consuming, Like, how do you in this no spend, you know, no shop challenge, how did you reconcile the two creating and consuming with like not bringing more in? How can I

stop being a craft holders? Yeah? Well, I actually I feel like creation and consumption are really opposing energies and that we spend we get so much well being from creation. We are creative beings. Humans are creative and it's something that's innate. Even if you're not a crafter. People like to make things. We like to bring things to life, even ideas or you know, books, songs, poetry, dinners, like

whatever it is people are. Most people have something that kind of lights them up that is a creative endeavor. And consumption, because of just the ease and the way that we value instantaneous, you know, problem solving and quick conveniences, consumption is kind of overridden. A lot of what used to be are opportunities for creation. Most homes used to make food and have a garden, and most people men and women knew at least some basic mending and sewing

and things like that for their for their households. I mean, if we go back a hundred years, people are chopping wood, people are painting and doing glasswork and doing pottery, functional pottery that they are gonna then use in their homes. And there's so many like really beautiful artisan crafts that used to be just part of normal life that are

now kind of on the fringes. And while I'm not like a self reclaimed homestead or by any stretch of the imaginations, although i do have chickens, they're laying their own eggs being creative back there, um, and we do have a garden. I I feel like necessity is that I mean, this is such a common phrase, but necessity is the mother of invention, right, And when you need something and you don't have an automatic, easy, convenient way to acquire it, your mind goes to work in new ways.

So rather than a quick trip to target, let's take the example of my five year old. Two weeks after we start our challenge, he says, he remembers this conversation we had and he's like, hey, mom, I want a new toy. And he's got a toy root with plenty of toys. But I think he was just excited because we had talked about making a toy and he's like, okay, Mom, I wanted toy today. Let's make a toy. After school he came home from preschool. We went into the craft

room and said, what do you want to make? And he said, I want to make a car. So we found some clay. It was like air dr clay, but you could have achieved the same result with Plato or something. It just wouldn't have lasted as long. And we looked up pictures of cars, and he, you know, his cute little five year old hands, molded his little car and we used toothpicks to drill like the hole where you

put the wheels on. And we spent an hour creating together in a really like low stakes environment because he was five and he wanted something for himself to play with. This wasn't going on display. I wasn't trying to sell it on Etsy. It was just a fun interaction with my son. And I recognized that two weeks before if we hadn't made this challenge that if my son had asked for a car, probably would have said, oh, let's you know, the next time we're target, let's grab hot wheels.

You know, it's like two dollars. It's not like the expense is the problem. The problem is the lack of opportunity to be creative together. The lack of opportunity, like we're starving ourselves of these possibilities of exercising our creativity in really interesting ways. And it was really fun throughout the whole challenge. And you know, this has become a really fundamental part of our family culture that we exercise our creativity. So we like to make decorations for the holidays.

I really don't like to have like one little basket of multi use decorations like a fabric pennant dan or that we put up for Easter, and put it up for Christmas, and we put it up for Birthdays, and we put it up for an anniversary, like it's this, you know, it's multicolor. We use it whatever. But for individual holidays, rather than going and accumulating a bunch of new decorations, we use that as an opportunity to make them.

And so you know, for Easter coming up, well paint eggs and you know a lot of people do that, will make cookies, will my daughter, I'm sure she loves drawing, so she'll drop pictures and we'll put those up on the windows. And then after the holiday we just take it all down. We can recycle it, and then we move on and the next time we have an opportunity

to do it again. There's just um an interesting like if you if you take away kind of like what you're talking about Jen with the decision fatigue, if you take away the opportunity to quickly solve the problem of needing something new, what you do is open up this entire possibility of if I don't have the quick fix, then how am I going to get there? How do I achieve the same end? And it will always be

a creative solution because it's not the easy solution. It's always going to be stretching, using what you have on hand, using things in new and different ways. I love the excitement that you're infusing under the banner of using what we already have. This statement that could feel quite STI fueling a problematic a barrier we won't get what we want, it's going to be frustrating and annoying, and how are

we going to do it too? Just pure excitement, enjoy and giving opportunity and space and margin for our creativity to really come alive and blossom. And what that can produce relationally with those in your home and and probably for yourself. What it What it draws to life, what it brings out, what it allows to come to the surface when we don't have the quick fixes immediately available.

I just I love it. The excitement is contagious. My I know, I was so excited listening to you because I feel so strongly, like with frugality, that it is not an inconvenient it's just not the most convenient. It gives you space to think creatively about how to solve your problem without spending money on it immediately. Like sometimes we do spend money to solve our problems, and we do take those quick fixes because it's worth it for

our time, but it's not the first immediate response. Like that's all you have to change up is that it's just not the immediate response. And a way you can do that is, of course, through a no spend challenge or no shopping challenge where you kind of train your brain, but like that's not the ultimate goal. Like obviously you went back to shopping and like we are we all

buy things. That's great, but like just hearing you your experience with your son, like we so often miss those opportunities because we are doing something like unproductive that we think is like more efficient, and so yeah, it was just like beautiful, my heart was singing. Well, it's it's so interesting. Kids just so naturally do this. They don't have the option, you know, up to a certain age, they don't really have the option to go to this

or and buy things. They don't have access to money, they don't have access to transportation, they don't it's not really part of their worldview, right, So oftentimes you notice kids using things in ways that you've never thought of using them because all they had it is pure creativity,

it's pure ingenuity. A few weeks ago, we we had an eight d degree day here in Richmond, which was unusual for March, and so I took my eight year old out of school for the day and we went and spent the day at the beach and it was so fun. And we got halfway there and I realized, oh, I didn't bring any beach toys. Like the beach toys are in a bin, but because it was March, I hadn't pulled them out yet, they weren't like easily accessible, so I did. I was like, oh, man, I didn't

bring the beach toys. That's gonna like cut down on how much fun she'll have at the beach. Boy, was I wrong? Like she doesn't care about having like the plastic beach toy that we collect, you know, that we have in the bin. She used the cans from we had packed a lunch. She used the cans and the extra like Oreo cookie container. Once the Oreos were gone,

that became like a mold for her sand castle. She was collecting seashells and cigarette butts to decorate her sand castle, which we had to quickly let's leave those ones there. But just how like yes, even for kids, like providing them with you know, really cute plastic sand toys is easy. That's easy. They see a rake and they're like, oh, rake, But that doesn't mean that they can't use the fork or like the seaweed. You know, those are's like sea

branches that work like a rake. You know, it's just fascinating to open our adult selves up to that childlike creativity and that imagination of like, if I didn't have any other option, what would I do here? I wouldn't just be frustrated and cry. I would look around and see what I could use in a new way. And I mean, that's when really exciting things start to happen. That's when fun That's when you make memories because you're not doing it the same way that it's always been done.

You're doing it in a memorable way, in a different way. And those are things that our families remember. There are things that we remember. Yes, So how do you see society thwarting our creativity so that we can start to identify, like what those triggers are. Well, I am. I teach craft classes on occasion, and one thing that I think is kind of funny. At the beginning of my classes, I'll often ask how many people have made something recently and not just thought that they made it because they

looked at it on Pinterest. And people always kind of laugh, because what Instagram and Pinterest and the Internet has done has given us a false sense of like satiating that creative endeavor that creative drive by having us see things. We see d I y projects, we see remodel, we see uh, something that we could do, and we consume the story of it. But we haven't actually done anything with our hands. We haven't actually made anything. And so I think separating out how much are we actually consuming?

And maybe even you know, if you, if you're curious, taking an actual inventory for a week, writing down your consumption versus your creation. How much time are you spending scrolling on social media, searching on Pinterest, looking at what's happening in other people's world versus building something tangible in your own space. How much time do you spend reading

versus writing or journaling. How much time do you spend searching through cookbooks or again, like on Pinterest for your meal plan versus actually cooking and enjoying the process of creating those meals. I find a lot of joy, and I think most people do in the moment of like

through the process of creation. And if you can be mindful in those moments, put your phone aside, you know, turn on some music, light a candle, and like, actually allow yourself to be in your body during these creative processes. It changes us so I think um just acknowledging like how much are you consuming versus creating and think of that as a balance where you for your well being, you want your creation, the way that you're bringing things to life in the world, to be greater on a

daily basis than your consumption. Speaking of creating together, something that we get to do every single week, I will consume this till the end of time and create more of it. The bill of the week, that's right, it's time for the best minute of your entire week. Maybe a baby was born and his name is William. Maybe you paid off your mortgage, Maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill. I mean bills, Buffalo bills, Bill, Clint, this is the bill

of the week, Miranda. Every week we asked one of our listeners or our guest to share with us their bill for the week, and we gave you twenty seconds before we started recording to think of yours. So please share with us what you have come up with. So the very first thing that came to mind is going to sound kind of ironic after we've been talking about my no spend challenge and my no shopping challenge, but

I will. I will start by saying that the way that we buy clothes now after our challenge is in what I call capsule shopping. So I shop for close twice a year in the spring and in the fall, and during about a week and a half period, I audit all of my kids clothes and my own clothes. We decide what they have that still fits, what they

need for the upcoming season. I do this my husband man in just his own life, but I do it for myself and for the kids, and then we decide what we need to set a budget for it, and we go do all of the shopping for the whole season for six months in about two weeks. What this does, I mean you can imagine all the benefits for it. I have a really clear budget. I'm able to be really thoughtful because I'm just clothes shopping like I can shop second hand. I know that what we're getting anyway

the lots of benefits. So we just wrapped that up a week ago. So now all of my kids and myself we've got all of our spring summer clothes. I don't need to think about talk about look at clothes again until September and the one of the last stores that we were shopping at, I had my son and

my daughter with me. Normally I do it one on one with the kids because they really like the personal focus and we get to you know, it's a great math exercise for them too, because they each get a budget and then as they choose things, we deducted and it becomes kind of like a math thing. And so at one of these that one of the I think it probably was the a very last store that we

were finishing up a couple of things. My daughter and I each got a spring dress and my son got a pair of swim trunks that he needed, and we were just kind of finishing. We had five items and they were all off according to the sign on the front of the store, and so I had kind of a rough estimate in my head of like, this is probably gonna be around two hundred dollars based on what they were, and so the girl rings them all up and then she charges me five hundred and fifty dollars

and I paid the bill. I I mean, I like paid it. And then I I said, I had this there's always this awkward I don't I'm not really awkward around money. I actually am fine talking about money. I like talking about money. I think it's great and we all should be more open about it, as you all know and talk about every single week. And there's something kind of like weird about this moment when you're like,

did you make a mistake? Because even though I could pay five fifty dollars for these five items, I don't think that I am supposed to, you know. I said, hey, she's already bagging it and like ready to send me out the door. And I said, hey, how could you tell me how we got to that total? And she was like, oh sure, let me look, and like she was on like this little handheld device. She was having a hard time, so she called the manager ver and I'm like, oh no, now it's turned into like a thing.

And I'm the embarrassing lady at the front of the store that like has a problem with my bill. Well, it turns out she had rung me up twice for every single item, and so she was charging me double for every single thing on the list. It wasn't one air, it was the whole thing. And the lady this was so funny because they talked about it kind of quietly behind the counter. They never like acknowledged that to me. She just said, we're going to refund three fifteen dollars

back onto your credit card. And I was like, oh great, that sounds more the reason why I'm doing the bath. In my head, I'm like, yeah, that's ends up around what I expected it to be. And that was very funny that they just if I had not said anything, she just would have set me out the store having paid double for every single item in the bag. Was was it user error or was it like computer error? It was like probably a combination of both. I don't know. She had like a handheld scanner and so I think

it just scanned double. And then she didn't She didn't seem funny to her. I mean didn't. She was just like, oh, that'll be like a million dollars. This seems very odd, you know. So my bill was a high bill that then was very happily brought down to a reasonable bill and expected bill because I opened my mouth, and I'm really glad that I did. Uh. Those handheld point of sales systems, I've got my own story. I won't get into that. I think I said it in a different episode.

But something something where button gets pushed and starts charging a double Yeah, don't. We don't need that, especially not us who we've got budgets and we know how much we're spending on stuff. I was like, how did I so vastly underestimate what's happening here? Like these swim trunks are lighted and well done. We got taken up for yourself and not paying more than you needed to. Yeah, that is hard. I always internalized. I was like, oh, I guess I must have made a mistake with how

they were priced. Yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking the stickers or like maybe the they didn't take the signage down out front or something. You know, you have that moment, Yeah, examine the receipt in the privacy of my own home because I'm too exposed right now. It was on the spot. Yeah, got it taken care of and finished up, done and dusted. Now I don't think about flush shopping again. For another thing, I love that embedded tip. That is perfect. I don't have to take up mental space about the year. It

is the best. Well, if you all who are listening, you've got a bill, whether it's uh Ler size bill or a double size bill, or a bill that you're it's too much, Bill. You need it to be less Bill. This approval Friends podcast dot Com slash Bill. Leave us your Bill. We're here for it. And now it's time for Lightning Round. Lightning Round the second half of the show that's light to shorter than the first half of the show. This is what I'm now going to call

the lightning Round. It's not a very lightning way, Nope, it's the opposite. So today's Lightning Round. We're all going to get a smidge vulnerable, but in like a fun way. So, Miranda, you are so creative, and so this episode has been a great mixture of like natural like traditional creativity, but then also just like getting creative and how we live. So we wanted to like know from all of us, like, what's something that you are creating right now you're excited about.

So Miranda, as our guest, you can go first. Let me think, Well, I have I have a few things. Um, we recently moved, and so something that I've just been kind of re outlining for myself is our garden plan. We we renovated a house for four years and touched every inch of it. It was like so lovely beautiful garden, great everything, and then we had one of those like flash of lightning appropriate for the lightning round moments of we there's a house down the block that fits our

family a little bit better. So all of that happened in the last couple of months, and I now have no garden and it's it's April, and I'm starting again. So I am in the process of creating a new backyard garden. And I loved the raised bed plans that

I did before. I created this a plan where using cedar fence posts, I can build raised garden beds for under a hundred dollars each, which is like, you know, a third of what they cost if you are using big cedar planks or having someone else build them for you. So that's that's on my docket this month, getting my cedar beds put in, figuring out exactly what I want to plant to yield the biggest bumper crop out of

my twelve square feet of backyard garden. And uh there, I just find so much magic in gardening that I didn't even I didn't even know. So I'm excited about creating a new garden. M Miranda speaking, you speaking to my soul right now? Yeah, you speak to Jill soul. I'm here soul search. I've got so I'll just go next because I'm already talking. Oh and that's beautiful, Miranda. I've got so many projects going on constantly, like I think I'm breaking my body. I am expecting so much

of my body these days. Similarly, I do have a garden, so I love that, and I love visiting it and continuing to chat with all my babies out there. Hoping that you were going to say talk to it, because if you were going to say it, I was going to say need encouragement, dude. There's real studies about that. It's a really oh yeah, and you know, I'm upset with one of my plants and I'm I'm telling it so and it might not survive because the things I've said. Anyhow,

that's not the thing I'm currently creating. Similar to you as well, Miranda, we're under renovations. We have been for two years. We probably got like another ten years ahead of us, but we do all of our own renovations, so it does feel like a really creative endeavor. And the current project right now is a lot of things, but I'll say Airbnb, we're still working on that, but

we're getting close to the even more creative stages. Of course, figuring out the layout was a big problem solving process for us, but I'm getting to the point where I can start to pick out how do I want the tile to look and the coloring and what do we want to make the space for our guests, And that's been funen Jen. Yes, so hopefully we are undergoing renovations by this time this episode airs. But that's not the

one that I'm actually most excited about. We have been working on our Virtual Summit, our second annual summit, and it's such a joy to create because we get to talk to so many cool people, like doing all the

interviews for it. I know a lot of summits are just like people talking over a slide show, but we love getting to know people and kind of curating like we've been trying to curate four days and twenty talks where it's like you can take a course on controlling your spending and improving your spending over like a full course over four days for free. And so to me, it's been so excited to try and innovate in this like online summit space and still like and bring people

together in it. So it's yeah, we're like deep into it and we're very excited for I'm very excited for it to be to head into the world at the end of this month. Jen, you're very digitally creative. I'm more tactile creativity. Yeah. I create all the time on the Internet. That's like where I find my creativity. So I feel like I cannot do. I don't have arts and crafts hoarde. That's not my thing, but I do

know people that do. Like But if you could hoard digital like crafts like I would have at oh my Gosh, yes, websites, articles like every oh my Gosh, I would be a hoarder for sure. Tabs if you could. I if tabs didn't go away, I have a lot of tabs. I've never I've never figured out the tabs. People. I feel like you have like maybe three at a time, And I close the browser at the end of every browsing

session like it's it's gone out. And then I have friends that like, I don't know how you keep track though we don't don't it's the anxiety that keeps you moving history though, can't you use your history? I sometimes like I do. Sometimes you close the tab too early, and you're like, man, I needed that twenty others open.

I'm curious. So this is totally off subdict. But if your tabs correlate to your notifications like on text or on email or anything else, like, do you clear the inbox and clear the text out and stuff like that or do you have that little Do you have badges that tell you how many unread are happening at any given point. So I have muted all of my notifications and all my badges, and I just ignore the fact that I have over two thousand unread emails. Um, you can have art belt on my personal in box. I

have for my business inbox. I for sure have an assistant who like keeps us in inbox zero, But yeah, I have to. My personal email inbox is quite overwhelming. And I still have unrolled me, which is like a thing that you can, yeah, roll up a bunch of promotional emails. I have that and it still keeps coming. Yeah. Yeah, Well, Miranda, if someone wants you to be one of their tabs in their life, on their computer, on their phone, where

can they get more from you? Yeah? Well, I have a weekly podcast all about intentional living it's called Live Free Creative. It comes out Thursday mornings at six am Eastern and the show helps people live more aligned with their values, live on Purpose, so touches a little bit on frugality, but mostly on you know, to all different aspects of living aligned with the things that matter most

to you. And I'm online on Instagram at Live Free Miranda. Occasionally, I've found a positive correlation with the amount of time I spend off of Instagram and my my life satisfaction, So I check in a couple of times a week. And then my I have a book. I wrote a book about our yearlong challenge and published a couple of years ago. It's called More Than Enough, and that's available on my website Live Free Creative dot co and on Amazon. Yeah,

so those are the places I'm mostly. My favorite thing is you all could attest to I'm or my favorite thing is the podcast and being able to have a weekly chat with people and show up there talk about things that are interesting. So that's my favorite place too to create is my Live re Creative podcast. Awesome. Well, thanks again Miranda for coming on the show and we can't wait to talk to you again one day. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Jill, what did

you think of that one? I'm gonna actively try not to do what I apparently do after every interview. That was so good, although I guess I just did that. I you. You know, these are so fun for me when we get to bring other people onto the show. And again, I think Miranda brings such a unique perspective creativity. I really enjoy what she has to say about making sure that we are give thing space and margin for our own creative endeavors, like hands on things or mind

on things, more than we consume. And this idea of consuming also being scrolling the internet is something I've not completely pieced together before. I think of consumption with throwaway things, and that's something you know, we focused on in this podcast before too, like going more zero waste. But I love the idea of even less consumption of even digital things because it's good in measure. But if it's outweighing phenomenally my own endeavors and my own creative outlets, then

it's not going to be beneficial for me. So that's that's my takeaway. Yeah, and I don't consider myself a traditionally creative person. I mean I again do not have like craft stuff. I did a few like crafty things growing up, but I was never really good at it. So when I hear creativity, it's it's usually I think,

reserved for artists and creative types like Miranda. But when she was talking about how we all have this desire to create and no matter what it is, it doesn't have to be art, but we all have a desire to create and consuming consumption, all of that, like solving your problems with money, robs us of that we are

so used to being so efficient. And yeah, some seasons do call for efficiency over creativity, but when you take away the option of going straight to spending money to solve your problems, and you just first put in this one barrier of how can I get creative to solve this problem without money, and think about it, think about if it's feasible for you, if you right now, if you want to try it, and if it isn't, don't.

But if it is, then you've given yourself this opportunity to be creative, to create and potentially create these memories alongside of it that you wouldn't have had you just jumped right to spending money. Well, clearly we like talking about this, but thank you all for listening, and in celebration of this free summit that's coming up June, we want to share some of the comments you all made about our one that was last year. For those of

us who are losing track of time these days. One event last year like this one from Christie M. She said about the summit, Wow, just wow, you guys are so wonderful. Please keep going. I missed a lot in the chaotic week I had, but I still gained so much just being able to tune in from the email links. I have listened to every episode of your Girlfriends podcast. Yet there's still more you have to offer. Yeah, we do, Chris,

and we're doing it again. We got more to offer with our twenty speakers at this free event, and it's totally separate from the podcast. It's not gonna be anything you hear on the podcast. Come join us for Goal Frugal Summer Camp. Yeah, thank you so much, Christie. And we do pack a lot into four days, but the event is designed to be helpful even if you just turn on one session on in the background on your phone or laptop while you're doing dishes, or maybe you

just turn into tune into like one happy hour. We do happy hours, live happy hours with you guys every night of the summit, and we talked about the day's topics. So maybe you don't even get time to listen to a session, but you want to join us on a happy hour or even just for all the gift cards we're going to be giving away, like yeah, theyre going to be fun, yes, so fun. We just we want to see you there because our listeners got so much out of it last year and so did we, and

so we're so excited to do again. So thanks for listening, and if you want your free ticket to this year summit, June had to Frugal Living Summit dot com and don't miss out on the early bird deal we've got going for that spending Mastery fundle See you guys next week. Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Syrian. I'm getting so jazzed for this, Jen jazz jazzed viewing it like a summer camp. Last year when we did it, it was during the Summer Olympics and that was fun. Fee it

that way. YEA. Our closing ceremonies was like the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics. So we think I rewatched our closing ceremonies from last year, and if you didn't attend, you don't know. But if you did attend, you got to see my son in all of his two year old glory. And and we had this candle that we lit as like our flame, and it turned out to be the same size as the Olympic torch in the

Winter limp same size and so very unremarkable size. And so for the closing ceremonies, we just put the candle on a table and we played the music, and Kai ran up and blew out the candle and he was so proud of himself. We were all proud of him. Everyone was stoked. And then Eric like taught him this dance with his fingers and and then he just was dancing. At the end, I was like, this is the best

thing that that might need to be. Even though there's no Summer Olympics happening this year, we still needed to resurrect that adorable video or come up with something else that kind of can do. Oh yeah, that we will definitely do. Hold for that. See you guys there, it's free. We love that word. Frugal Living summit dot com