5 Frugal Lessons I Learned From My Mom

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In honor of Mother’s Day today, I thought I would do a kind of ode to my frugal Yankee mother. She taught me a lot about what I know these days about frugal living. So here’s looking at you, mom, and the five frugal lessons you taught me.

1. Laundry doesn’t need to dry in a dryer. Growing up my mom hung most of our laundry out on the clothes line, which often doubled as a curtain for the backyard plays my friends and I would create and put on during summer vacations. My mom still hangs up the lion’s share of her laundry, and so do I. Which is why my laundry room looks more like a tenement apartment than a room in a four-bedroom colonial.
2. The right thing to do is recycle. My mother founded a recycling program back in the mid-1970s before anyone knew that green would be the new black. This recycling center sat behind a local middle school, and we would spend our weekends there peeling the labels off of glass jars and separating phone books from their covers, all so they could be recycled. These days I’d venture to guess that our weekly recycling output at my house is 10X greater than our regular trash output.
3. It’s not just about recycling, it’s about reusing. When I was a kid, we hardly threw anything out. Sure, we recycled when we could but for the most part, my mom managed to keep a ton of stuff out of the trash by repurposing and reusing everyday items. Washed out jelly jars became drinking glasses. Empty Velveeta cheese boxes became drawer organizers. Leftover papers from school got turned over and became scratch paper. Old clothing became rags. She even found ways to reuse grass clippings–as makeshift mulch for her gardens. I continue to challenge myself to figure out ways to reuse something in my home before I throw it into the trash, such as empty jars that now hold pencils or spare change, or t-shirts that I’ve turned into cleaning rags.
4. Composting isn’t a dirty word. You’ve probably heard this tag line before: most mother teach their kids to clean and cook. Mine taught me to compost. Well, when I was little, one of my chores wasn’t just emptying the dishwasher or dusting the living room–it was taking out the compost. Not taking out the trash, taking out the compost. For as long as I can remember, my mother composted food scraps. And like mother like daughter, I now compost our food scraps. It’s thanks to my composting habits that we’ve reduced our garbage output and I had all the supplies I needed to create a lasagna garden last fall.
5. An idling car wastes gas. Granted, my mother learned this idling-wastes-gas lesson during the gas crisis of the 1970s, when people had to wait in long lines to buy gas. But these days schools across the country have created idle-free zones as a way of cutting down on carbon emissions, which is surely good for the earth. Well, it’s also good for your wallet not to leave your car running when you’re just sitting around. One website estimates that Americans waste 3.8 million gallons of gas a year from idling. With a gallon of gas costing what it does these days, you do the math on how much money that wastes, too.

What kinds of frugal lessons did you learn from your mom?

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Filed under Mother's Day

Tags: composting, lasagna garden, recycling