Being a stay at home mom has a lot of benefits. The big one is being there for your kids. But it also has a lot of disadvantages, of which the biggest is usually living on a single income. The financial stress can be tremendous.

This naturally leads to wanting to live a frugal life. But just what is a frugal lifestyle, and how important should it be to you?

Just what is a frugal lifestyle?

How Do You Define Frugal?

Everyone has a slightly different idea as to just what constitutes a frugal lifestyle. Most people don’t mean a lifestyle where they go to extremes, denying themselves all extras and most simple comforts in life. It’s also not about living as though you’re poor or completely broke.

A healthy frugal lifestyle will be comfortable for your family.

A healthy frugal lifestyle will be comfortable for your family. You shouldn’t feel completely deprived all the time. You should have different things that are priorities for you, such as preferring to take a family walk to spending $50 or more for a family night at the movie theater.

Frugal Isn’t the Same as Cheap

It’s easy to think of frugality and cheapness as the same thing. They do have similar motivations in some respects. But when you really look at them, they are not the same thing at all. I consider frugality to be more deliberate.

When you’re being cheap, quality isn’t a consideration, as a general rule. You buy the cheapest. You decline to spend money even where you should.

When you’re frugal, you’re making more deliberate decisions about how you will spend your money. Sometimes you’ll pay more for quality, because it will cost you less in the long run. You’ll have thought out your priorities.

Frugality for Stay at Home Moms

How frugal you need to be when you’re staying at home depends on the needs of your family and what your family’s income is like. Some will need to take extreme steps. For others, simpler steps will be enough.

The advantage you have is time.

The advantage you have is time. You have the time to do frugal basics such as cooking nearly all meals at home. You have the time to do coupon clipping. These simple frugal activites can make a big difference.

Whatever choices you make when it comes to living your frugal lifestyle, there are a few basics you should always include:

• Living within your means
• Bringing down any existing debt
• Limiting waste
• Knowing your priorities and sticking to them.

There’s no simple frugal path that leads to comfort with a change in your lifestyle. It’s quite likely that some of the changes you make will be a little uncomfortable for you at first. If they’re important enough to you, you will become comfortable with the changes in a short time. It’s much easier to be frugal if you don’t feel as though you’re denying a lot of wants.

When you have an online business, you need to be at least somewhat comfortable with computers and the internet. If you aren’t you’re going to spend more time struggling with things than maybe you should. But sometimes those skills get in the way of running your business.

What Goes Wrong?

A big part of the problem is that many people who are good with technology enjoy it too much. Knowing how to design websites, for example, can lead to spending too much time designing a beautiful website, rather than adding in content and marketing your site.

You can also get stuck on adding cool little interactive features. While these can make your sites more interesting to visitors, they may not be the right things to add before your site is online and bringing in the early visitors. Adding features later on can help to bring people back.

What Can You Do?

No matter how good you are with the technology, you need to think first about what will appeal to visitors to your site. An attractive site is nice, interactivity has a lot of benefits, but what comes first is the needs of the visitors.

For most online businesses, that means you do not need to get all that fancy. That’s not what makes sales in most cases.

What makes sales is knowing what the customer wants, and making it available. Don’t add something in just because you think it’s neat. Add it in because it will benefit your customers and help you to earn more money.

Remember the Importance of the Non-Technical Side

Even when your audience is fairly tech savvy, there’s a lot of non-technical parts to running a successful online business.

You usually need to be a good writer, or at least know how to hire one. Those sales pages won’t write themselves. Neither will your articles or any other content you want to put on your sites.

You need to market your business. While there are many cool tools to help you do your marketing more efficiently, you must understand the process if you’re going to be successful in using the tools. Otherwise they’re a faster way of wasting your efforts.

Use Your Skills Wisely

There are a lot of advantages to being comfortable with technology when you want to grow your business. They can make you more comfortable with experimenting with newer kinds of marketing, giving you a step up on those who stick with older methods.

You might be more comfortable than average in making podcasts or videos, for example. These can be great for bringing in more people to your business.

You might be quicker to discover a hot new social networking site. So many of the early adopters of Twitter and other such sites were able to bring in business from them before other marketers knew they were there.

These things are advantages if you use them wisely. You won’t always guess correctly which move is the right one to make, but then none of us can do that. Keep working and remember that the tech side isn’t the only important thing in your home business.

It’s amazingly easy to skip things that would help your home business. It’s something most of us do at times in all parts of our lives. How much would it help your business if you could get past that habit?

I started thinking on this when talking to my husband the other day about his upcoming jury duty. He’s one of those people who somehow gets called for it every time he’s eligible. Last time, he got summons for jury duty in both Federal and Superior Courts within about a week of each other. He’s just that prone to being called in for it. It’s quite a relief that this time he doesn’t have to untangle which court gets priority.

But he did make life a little harder for himself, and a couple days before his service was to start, he was realizing that he should have taken the time to correct it. He was summoned to jury duty in Fontana. He works in San Bernardino, however, right by the courts there. He was told by several people he could request a transfer, and that such requests are usually granted.

He didn’t, which means a longer drive in. It was particularly annoying for him when he called in last night and the message was to call in again at 11 in the morning to see if they need him. If he had gotten that message from the court right by his work, it would have been easier to deal with.

I think we all do things like that. It can be as simple as procrastinating on a project for your business that you know will bring in money. It may be failing to keep up on new trends in your industry. It can be taking too much time on projects that aren’t likely to earn you anything at all.

Take a look at what you’re doing with your business and what you want to get done with it. What’s keeping you from finishing both lists?

If you think it’s a lack of time, take a look at what you are spending your time doing. Is it worth the amount of time you’re spending on it, or should you be planning out your days better?

If it’s a lack of knowledge or experience, why aren’t you trying to get that knowledge or experience? It’s not going to happen on it’s own. You have to do the work and make it happen.

Is it fear of trying something new? Trying something new in your business is hard, but so often that’s what pays off, either in money or in lessons learned from failure.

Whatever is slowing you down is, find a way to push yourself past it. You can accomplish so much more when you really push your limits.

I’m still getting used to summer break around here. It’s not always that simple when you work at home. Suddenly the kids are everywhere, every day.

I’ve given my kids warning, though. Summer also means they’ll be learning new skills, not all of them for fun things.

Chores

In some ways, summer is a great time to add on new chores to the kids’ to-do lists. They have more free time to do chores, and certainly time to pick up new skills relating to them. My oldest will be learning more about how to do laundry, for example.

Fun Skills

Remember the fun skills kids can learn over the summer.

You don’t want to forget the fun skills kids can learn over the summer. Swimming is my usual big one for the kids, and it will continue to be the big one until they’re all excellent swimmers.

My oldest will learn more cooking skills this summer, as she’s tall enough to deal with more things. She’s pretty eager.

We’re also considering sewing skills. Not terribly vital the way most people live these days, but it can be a fun skill anyhow. Just have to see if my hand-me-down sewing machine is in good working condition still.

Find out what your kids want to learn that you can either teach or sign them up for a class to learn. Maybe look at subjects their school isn’t teaching so well.

Money Habits

While you should encourage your kids to have good money saving and spending habits all year, the summer can be a great time to go into more details. Have the ones who are old enough really look at what goes into a household budget. Somewhat younger ones can deal with just a grocery budget.

If you’re going on a family vacation, have the kids make their own budgets for whatever spending money they’re allowed for the trip. These will probably need to be pretty flexible, but help them to understand when they can come back to that treasure that is a “must buy” the instant you get wherever you’re going. It’s not easy keeping kids from spending money too quickly much of the time, but it’s a great lesson.

Another great time to teach kids about budgets is when you do back to school shopping, probably later in the summer. Give them a budget that you can deal with. Let them see how much they can afford to buy on it. This can come as a real shock to those who need the latest and hottest brands and styles, but it can also help them to see where less expensive clothes are a good thing.

Writing to Pen Pals

Kids usually have a few friends they miss over the summer. Maybe a school friend goes away for the summer, or maybe there’s an old friend who used to live nearby but doesn’t anymore. Or maybe there’s someone else your child could write to.

Encouraging your kids to write to a pen pal is a wonderful way to encourage them to keep writing during the summer.

Encouraging your kids to write to a pen pal is a wonderful way to encourage them to keep writing during the summer. You can improve penmanship and writing style this way.

I don’t expect long letters when my daughter writes to friends, and she doesn’t get long letters in return. Letters don’t happen in either direction terribly often. But it’s a lot of fun for them to get letters.

As kids get older, this may switch to emails. You will have to decide if this is acceptable to you or if you want to keep encouraging hand written letters. On the one hand, emails are more quickly delivered, and may encourage more frequent writing. On the other hand, they don’t help with penmanship or the habit of writing traditional letters to people. Your call.

Volunteering

If you can spare the time, take your kids out to volunteer somewhere. Pick a cause that will let you and your child work for them and go to it.

You don’t have to do it often, but volunteering is an amazing way to let your children see that others have need of their help. There’s a lot to be done for people who are much less fortunate.

Problem Solving

One thing many schools don’t teach so well right now is problem solving. Set up a challenge for your child and have him or her solve it.

Set up a challenge for your child and have him or her solve it.

This could be a series of clues you set up. It could be a discussion of a challenge you faced in your own past, and you ask your child how he or she would solve it. It could be an imaginary scenario. It could even just be math problems more challenging than given in school, if that’s your preference.

Being able to think a problem through, whatever sort of problem it may be, is a great skill to have in life. Not every problem has a clear right and wrong answer, of course, but that can be a part of the lesson.

Assertiveness

One thing that can be really hard for kids is to speak out for themselves. Others do it almost too well. But many kids don’t speak up when they have a problem they need help with, or when they have their own opinion.

Being assertive at appropriate times is a big help. It’s easy for parents and teachers to encourage kids to be passive, saying they’re being good when they don’t speak out. That’s not always the right lesson.

If your child has an opinion, hear them out. Enc0urage them to express it in detail, even if you don’t agree.

Too assertive can be a problem as well, so if this looks to be a problem, talk about when it’s right to assert yourself and when it may be better to be a bit more careful about asserting an opinion. It can be a problem in school at times, especially with some teachers. Make sure home is a safe place for your kids to express opinions, and have calm conversations about differing opinions.

This is a lot to work on over the summer, but you don’t have to do it all. Get the things done that appeal to you. And make sure you make time for fun.

There are a lot of ways you can succeed in home business, and many ways to fail. But there are still more ways you can make your path to success more difficult.

No one is going to take a perfect path to success, with no mistakes at all. Mistakes are where we learn how to run a successful business. That doesn’t mean you need to take the hard way. These are some of the ways you can slow down your success.

1. Fail to consider if anyone wants what you’re selling.

Sure, you love what you’re offering, but who else does? There are not always enough other people interested in your product.

This is particularly a problem for craft businesses. Lots of people do crafts. You may be skilled, but that doesn’t guarantee that someone else will want what you make.

It also helps to remember that your home business has competition, especially when you’re online. If you make a product, others do as well, more often than not, and it may be sold on major sites such as Amazon as well.

2. Ignore offline markets.

The internet is a wonderfully easy place to start a home business in many ways. Hosting and domain names are cheap, and even a professional design can be quite affordable.

That doesn’t mean the internet is the perfect place to run your business. It might be, but in many cases you can also grow your business offline. You can find local stores that want to sell your products, perhaps. You can find local businesses that need your services.

3. Assume a website is all you need for online success.

A website is a wonderful tool for many home businesses. Having one doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful.

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a successful website. Not only do you need to have one that is interesting to your target market, you have to market it so that your target market can find you. Customers do not appear out of thin air.

4. Expect significant business from family and friends.

This is the old way they would tell you to build a network marketing business. As noted in the 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing, relying on family and friends to build your business is a big mistake. It often does little more than annoy your family and friends when you keep trying to get them to buy from you or join your opportunity.

They’ll buy from you if they’re interested. Pestering them isn’t going to build your business.

5. Lack of focus.

Most of us have lots of interests. That doesn’t need to be reflected in a range of home businesses, even if you think they complement one another.

I don’t mean that it’s a bad idea to have multiple businesses… once you know what you’re doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s not the best of ideas at all.

Pick a business idea and work on growing it. Until you have a reasonable level of success, stick with that one. Otherwise you’re just confusing yourself.

6. Spend too little time working on your business.

Working at home is hard. There are a lot of distractions that you will face every day. Some need to be dealt with, such as raising your family. Other things, such as goofing off online or watching television, need to be left for non-work hours.

Set aside time to focus just on growing your business. Don’t play online. Turn off any distracting applications and browser windows, and promise yourself that you won’t open them until you’re done. Turn off the TV or work in a room without one.

7. Not getting enough rest.

Sometimes you’re going to have to work extra long hours to keep your business going. You probably shouldn’t do this too often.

If you don’t get enough rest, you’re going to burn yourself out and make foolish mistakes with your business, not to mention the impact on the rest of your life. Stay up late or get up even earlier than usual when you have to, but be sensible about it.