Introduction: Our Frugal Journey

Hello and welcome to the Aussie Frugal Family!

My name is Rachel, and in 2023 I started a TikTok account called Aussie Frugal Family.

Aussie Frugal Family was born at a very tough time for us. My husband, Rory, had just lost his job of 13 years overnight, and we were trying to make ends meet on a very limited income. We also had a nine month old baby, so I was also only working part time. We had no savings, bills were piling up and we desperately needed to do something.

Rory quickly found a manual labouring job and started working three days a week, just to earn a very small amount of regular income. He also started his own scaffolding business. This was, again, very rough on him physically as he was doing it all on his own. He was working weekends, weekdays, and it was fairly unreliable. This meant I was at home alone with our baby a LOT, so it was a very tough time not just financially but also emotionally. These challenges came at a time when interest rates were going up and up, so our mortgage was a real stress. Groceries had also started getting ridiculous, bills were going up, everything just seemed impossible. We had to make a change. 

I had been interested in frugal living for quite a while. I was a pretty intense minimalist for a while in my 20s, when everybody and their dog was on the minimalism train. I was also very inspired by shows like Extreme Cheapskates and I was doing a LOT to save money. And it worked, I saved plenty of money to fund my very exciting younger life. I did lots of travelling, more than my fair share of partying, bought a brand new car, bought a house. I definitely already knew the value of a dollar and I knew how to save money. But I’d always been fairly financially comfortable too. I’d never really been in a position where I was actually concerned about money, worried about how to pay the bills, or how to make ends meet. It was also the first time I had little people depending on me.

So, when the proverbial shizzle hit the fan, Aussie Frugal Family was born... mostly out of necessity to learn how to budget at a deeper level, at a family level, with far more expenses than I’d ever had. I had to learn how to really make things stretch. 

Since my start on TikTok in 2023, I have also started posting on Instagram and Facebook, and I post longer form content on YouTube and a Podcast on Spotify. Now I certainly don’t claim to be some magic money expert, and I’m also not what I would consider extreme when it comes to frugality. Now, at this stage of my life, I am just a very normal mum, from a very normal family, who hit a very normal rough patch that so many other people have experienced before.

So, now we’re really focusing on navigating our way through having a family, raising children, living a beautiful, abundant, peaceful, happy life in what I would consider to be a pretty expensive time to be alive. We absolutely don’t claim to be perfect, and I’m sure we will make mistakes and change our minds and develop deeper levels of understanding along the way. But for now, we’re just out here doing our messy best and sharing what we learn with you guys. 

My overall aim is to have a very open and honest discourse about topics that I think many people still don’t want to talk about. I chat about our personal financial situation in terms of how we organise our money to best suit our needs, strategies on how to save money on your grocery shop, how we have managed having babies and raising a family on a budget, balancing a healthy lifestyle on a budget, creating a stockpile for when times do get tough, different types of side hustles, and much more. I am very open to feedback, so if you would like to hear about a particular topic please do let me know and I’m sure I can address it sooner or later. I would love for this to be an open community where we can share ideas. I am not the absolute master of money saving, I am not a mentor, I am simply the vessel, I think we all have valuable insight and tips to share and I would love to hear yours.

So if you’re interested in any of these topics you can check me out at Aussie Frugal Family on Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and Spotify. Give us a follow, a like, a subscribe... I don’t know, just click as many buttons as you can.

As always, thank you so much for your time. I can't wait to share our journey with you!