Creativity Over Consumerism with Miranda Anderson

retirement investment account just sitting there. Let Capitalize help you find an old four a one k and roll it over to an roth an Ira of your choice. They do that for free Frugal Friends podcast dot com. Slash Capitalize do that on your spring break.

a couple other episodes to check out. Episode three seventy eight Psychological Reasons Why We Impulse by one of my favorite episodes, and then episode three sixty eight Deinfluencing Yourself from Social Media with Paige Pritchard, another one of my favorite episodes. Those are both really good. Today we're talking about not just like the nuts and bolts of not spending,

but Miranda she's a great content creator. She published her book More Than Enough back in twenty nineteen, so that's a really good book to read if you want to read about somebody's no shopping year long no shopping child. Since then, she's created a lot of content about around sustainability, intentionality. She's not even she's not a personal finance content creator, so she's just got a lot of wisdom on creating space essentially by limiting our consumption.

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 I got a mini van 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. They 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've been online for a long time. I was an og blogger. I started

a blog in two thousand and seven. It was a hobby for many years, and around a couple of years before our 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 hundred 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 things 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 mail 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 habit 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 Joneses, 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 I had just watched a documentary about minimalism and one of the things that I, well, 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 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 the other thing is that that's a model that I've seen in a lot of books, and you know, like I love the Happiness Project by Gretchen 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 the 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 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 them 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, it 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'd 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 DIY 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 had just organized these cabinets and made them very beautiful with my five hundred dollars 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 three and a half years maybe, and I had kitchen cabinets full of things. I had a pantry

full of things. I had a home office full of stuff. My kid's 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 walkthrough 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 there, Like 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 gonna buy anymore, but we actually don't have any clothes to wear, like 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 in math rather than deciding that it isn't.

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.

But the difference between that and actually digging in and deciding what your values are what matters most to you, how you 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 going to try this. We're going to try to not acquire any new things for the year and see what happens, and maybe we'll those six months and realize that it doesn't work. You know that we do absolutely need more clothes or whatever, but we're going to 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 grocery, like just like food, and like, you know, go buy

groceries at Target. You always come home with a couple 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 I didn't even browse 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.

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 that's when we're tired from making

all the decisions, is when we make the bad ones. Really, So that's what I love about the challenges.

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 gonna 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 gonna 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, 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 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 kids, 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 grew out of his cowboy boots. We lived in Texas. You cannot be without a pair of cowboy boots, and he had walked through them like a hole in the bottom of them. They were like daily shoes.

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?

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 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 households. I mean, if we go back one hundred years, people are chopping wood, people are painting and doing glass work and doing pottery, functional pottery that they are going to 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 proclaimed homesteader by any stretch of the imaginations, although I do have chickens, they're laying their own eggs being creative back there, and we do have a garden, I feel like necessity is the 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 room 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 want a toy today. Let's make a toy. After school, he came home from preschool. We went into the craft room and I 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 dric 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'd 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, I probably would have said, oh, let's you know, the next time we're at 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. I have like one little basket of multi use decorations, like a fabric pennant banner that we

put up for Easter. We put it up for Christmas, so 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, we'll paint eggs and

you know a lot of people do that. We'll make cookies, will my daughter, I'm sure she loves drawing, so she'll draw 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 an interesting like if you if you take away kind of like what you were 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.

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.

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 we all buy things.

pure creativity, is pure ingenuity. A few weeks ago, we had an eighty 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 of 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 was like, oh, man, I didn't bring the

beach toys. That's going to like cut down on how much fun she'll have 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 led to cigarette Let's leave those ones over 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 there'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. They're things that we remember.

having us see things. We see diy projects, we see remodel, we see 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'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 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. In 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 just acknowledging, like how much are you consuming versus creating and think of that as a balance where you for your wellbeing, 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.

the upcoming season. I do this. My husband manages his own life, but I do it for myself and for the kids, and then we decide what we need, 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 secondhand. I know that what we're getting anyway, there lots of benefits, so we just wrap that up could go. 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 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 one of the I think it probably was the very last store, that we

were finishing up a couple things. My daughter and I each got a spring dress and my son got a pair of a swim trunks that he needed, and we were just kind of finishing. We had five items and they were all fifty percent 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 going to be around two hundred dollars based on what they were, and so the girl rings all up and then she charges me five hundred and

fifty dollars and I paid the bill. I mean, I like paid it. And then 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 hundred and fifty dollars for these five items, I don't think that I am supposed to, you know. So 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 here and I'm like, oh no, no, 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, 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 er,

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 hundred and fifteen dollars back onto your credit card. And I was like, oh, great, that sounds more reason why I'm doing the math in my head. I'm like, yeah, that 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 sent me out the store having paid double for every single item in the bag.

a little bit better. So all of that happened in the last couple months, and I now have no garden and 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 one 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 backyard garden. And 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.

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 fun, so fun.

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, 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.

at Live Free Miranda. Occasionally, I've found a positive correlation with the amount of time I spend off of Instagram and my life satisfaction, So I check in a couple times a week. And then I have a book. I wrote a book about our year long challenge and published a couple of years ago. It's called More Than Enough, and that's available on my website Live Freecreative dot co and on Amazon. Yeah. So those are the places. I'm mostly my favorite thing, as you all could attest to.

I'm sure my favorite thing is the podcast, and I'm 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 to create, is my live Free Creative podcast.

you are thick in the midst of renovations. Yea, the summit is not something we're doing. If you did listen to Jen's you know, vulnerability round, that's not happening right now.

prompts for you to consider. We're giving you things to meal plan and prep over the weekend. It is at the end of the month, we give you a budget toolkit like it is chalk.

that I generate less trash waste and less recycling waste. Lastly, I made three big new to me meals using food I had my freezer and pantry. I am doing a no spend February now, thanks again for all you do.