Today is the 57th edition of our periodic guest post series called 10 Questions. We have a list of 17 questions we pose to fellow financial bloggers, and they are free to pick and choose 10 or answer all of them. Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future edition of 10 Questions.
This week, we hear from Frugal Paradise. I was trying to think of a clever introduction when I read this on their blog:
The story of Frugal Paradise begins way back in 2007, when an unsuspecting Mr. Paradise knocked on the door of Ms. Paradise’s graduate laboratory in the sub-basement of the physics building in a small college town.
And then I read this:
…and Ms. Paradise knew she had finally met the man of her dreams when he surprised her with a box of 50 Cadbury eggs for her birthday.
Meeting in a laboratory? Cadbury eggs? How cool is all of that? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mr. and Mrs. Frugal Paradise.
Tell me about your blog and why it’s great.
The purpose of Frugal Paradise is to help show people that being money-conscious isn’t synonymous with being cheap and unhappy. We talk about simple money-saving strategies that anyone can do, as well as healthy eating and wellbeing. You can become financially independent much faster than you’d ever guess just by making some simple changes in your life that you won’t even notice after a short period of time.
Tell me how you’re going to change the world with your blog (dream big or don’t dream at all!).
The word still isn’t out there about financial independence and early retirement. The more voices we have, the more people will learn that working until you’re 65 or 70 doesn’t have to be the norm! We found that we were constantly referring friends and acquaintances to our favorite blogs online about early retirement, so we figured, why not start our own and help get these ideas out to more people?
What goals do you have for your blog, short and long term?
Frugal Paradise was just started at the beginning of 2016, but we have lofty goals! We are excited to continue get to know people in the financial blogging community and share some of our own ideas about achieving financial independence.
Short term we’ll being sharing content as we are able (we both still have full time jobs) and interacting more in the community. In the long term, once we reach financial independence, we are looking at starting up a not-for-profit financial consulting program for people who are just starting out along their path to early retirement.
What post are you most proud of and why?
We wrote a post in February called How to get off the hedonic treadmill which was featured on Rockstar Finance. This was super exciting because we had more visits to the site that day than all other previous days combined! In doing the research for the post we came to realize a lot of the things in our own lives that we take for granted, and we came up with some strategies to stay off our own hedonic treadmill.
One of our first posts was a review of our 2015 spending. We figured if we were going to start a blog about personal finance, we may as well put ourselves out there financially and share some of the things that we feel are important enough to spend our money on. Since then we’ve been posting monthly spending reviews and net worth updates. These have been a pretty big help to us in seeing our progress toward financial independence – hopefully they are helpful to others too!
Do you enjoy writing?
Definitely! Writing is something I (Mrs. Paradise) do for my job quite a bit, but that’s not the fun kind of writing like we get to do on the blog. It’s awesome to be able to share ideas when inspiration strikes, and having the blog has given us a new window for interacting with the financial blogging community.
1500 Days is about early retirement. Do you have early retirement dreams? At what age do you think you will retire?
We are in our early 30’s now and figure we have about 5-6 years until financial independence. Early retirement is another thing, but it will be nice knowing if something happens (e.g. one of us is let go or can’t work anymore), we’ll still be okay.
We are both happy and settled with our jobs right now, so working toward financial independence is mainly about peace of mind and freedom from being tied to our incomes.
Our pets are really important to us and we love animals (as you might notice from our blog!). Further down the line we hope to get more involved with our local animal shelter to volunteer once we retire. We’ve also talked about charitable giving and other ways we give back on the blog.
If blogging isn’t your full time gig, what is?
Mrs. Paradise is a researcher and Mr. Paradise is a teacher. Very fulfilling jobs but they can be high stress at times!
What is the best money management or investment tool you have come across?
The internet! We learned all we know about investing and money management from reading online.
How do you handle people with different views on money, ie spendy people?
This is tough. You don’t want to alienate your friends but you also want to stick to your guns and not spend money on things you don’t want or need just to fit in with others. We don’t judge other people for their choices and we deflect if someone tries to judge us for ours. We are happy with our financial plan so it doesn’t bother us (too much) if someone gives us a hard time about it.
We notice a lot of frugal people are into board games – what is your favorite?
We love board games! Our favorites right now are Dominion and 7 Wonders. We recently tried out a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which makes for an awesome party game. You know, if don’t mind blowing up a lot.
What is the best thing you’ve read lately?
Mrs. Paradise is reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. It’s a classic, right along with Dale Carnegie. Mr. Paradise is working his way through the Sherlock Holmes short stories.
What do you do for exercise?
DanceFit and hockey, you can guess who does which. I’m also on a quest to be able to do a pull up (yes, ONE pull up). I’m not even close right now, but I committed to working on it on the blog so I have a lot more incentive to keep up the work!
Thanks Frugal Paradise for the answers today! Follow the Paradisers at their blog, on Twitter and Instagram.
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I love this! That’s the same approach we use in our own life–being frugal doesn’t mean being cheap, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have luxuries or enjoy your life.
Agree! We are totally aligned with that too – frugal not cheap, and choose the things you want to spend on that bring you enjoyment!
Yep, “frugal not cheap” is one of our mottos over here. And sometimes you can find a lot of happiness in inexpensive stuff you don’t really “need”. I guess that’s why I refuse to give up my $10/month Birchbox 🙂
I enjoyed this post. In our case we enjoy music and books. Whereas we once spent money buying CDs, going to expensive concerts and buying books at bookstores, now we’ve found that we can get our entertainment for free or nearly free and enjoy it just as much. We go to concerts by local artists that are usually free or require only a small donation. We go to productions by local or youth theater groups that are often free or very inexpensive. We can stream music for free and often find free downloads. And now we usually go to the library instead of bookstores. Yesterday at the Friends of the Library book sale I bought 8 great books that will give me months of pleasure for $2, and I used a free coupon that was given out to vendors at our farmers market so they actually cost me nothing.
The point is that we’ve found that we can enjoy entertainment for much less than we used to spend (usually spending nothing at all). Our quality of live hasn’t diminished at all. In fact, I would say it has improved! Frugal definitely doesn’t have to mean cheap.
Hi Bill, these are great examples! Sometimes I am so amazed at what I can get from the library for free or nearly free that it almost seems like cheating. Our small town has a big college scene so there are a lot of free music options here too, after reading your comment I’m reminded I need to go check out what is coming up!
I buy used books all the time and find some of the odd one give you great insight into into what folks were thinking in the past.
This is one of the reasons why I loved “How to win friends and influence people.” It’s sometimes unbelievable how though the content differs, the relationship struggles that we all encounter today are essentially the same ones people were having eighty years ago. And the solutions are the same too!