About Frugal Mama

Frugal Mama is about creating high-quality family life on a low budget.

Published once a week, the blog is full of ideas that can help you save money, time and energy so you can focus on what’s important.

Frugal Mama sorts through the consumerist hype and helps you rediscover the pleasures of a simpler way of living.  It’s like Real Simple Family – on a budget.

Who Reads Frugal Mama?

Parents who want to save money, while:

• providing their children with a good education
• putting delicious food on the table
• enjoying a beautiful home, and
• having fun — with and without kids.

It’s for mothers and mothers-to-be who might be dreaming about:

• scaling back at work or quitting their jobs
• spending more time with their families
• buying a house
• building a nest egg for the future

It’s also for thoughtfully thrifty parents of all ages who would like to connect and share ideas with kindred spirits.

I love to hear from you!  Please send me your money-saving ideas to tips@frugal-mama.com.

To make sure you don’t miss an article, you can subscribe to Frugal Mama for free.

Meet the Author

Hi, I’m Amy Carden Suardi and I am a writer and a mother of three children.  I started Frugal Mama because I wanted to write about where spending less intersects with living better.

After over nine years of our family living on a tight budget, I’ve come to see more and more the silver lining of making do with less.

Besides the values, skills, and perspectives that our family has indirectly gained by saving money, we have also earned freedom.  Because we live below our means, for example, I am able to take care of my kids full-time.  My husband was also able to change careers and go back to school.

In addition to saving thousands of dollars for my family, my background includes:

• founding an organization to revitalize our neighborhood school (I received an award in 2008 from the Arlington (VA) County School Board for my successful effort)
• directing a co-operative daycare program of six classes, 72 parent volunteers and 72 children
• establishing two babysitting exchanges and participating in three
• editing and designing newsletters for elementary schools
• organizing sales and donations of used clothing and equipment in New York City
• writing articles about schools and parenting for Motherwords, The Arlington Connection, and Washington Parent
• starting a co-operative playgroup (where parents take turns caring for each other’s children)
• creating a writer’s critique group whose core members all went on to become published writers

Before I had a family, I graduated with honors from Brown University, lived and worked on the east coast, west coast, southwest and midwest, and traveled all over the world (on a shoestring, of course). Since getting married in 2000, my Italian husband and I have raised kids in Milan, Italy; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Arlington, Virginia. We currently reside in the frugal mama’s nightmare: Manhattan.

You can contact me at amy@frugal-mama.com.

To stay updated at no cost, please subscribe to Frugal Mama.

Frugal Mama’s Foundations

Unconditional Love: This blog is dedicated to my beloved husband.

Proofreading: Magazines have paid staff to make sure their i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.  I have my dad.  A retired doctor and Renaissance man, I’m grateful that his passions include English grammar — and his daughters.

Logo: My artist mother, Lynn H. Carden, designed the logo.  Besides being a wonderful mom, she is a professional painter who sells her work.  She is based in Ohio and is represented by the B. Deemer Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky.

Web Design: My sister, Jenny Carden Caro, her hubbie, and their web design team at Triple Smart helped bring the hand-drawn images and crude instructions to the modern age.  Despite their exacting, inept client, they always had a smile and a solution.  Check out some of their rocking websites and logos.

Photography:  The photos of me were taken by college friend Ben Herman.  He is a fantastic photographer and portraitist.  Check out his work and contact him at bjh1969@gmail.com.

I am also thankful to the many talented photographers at Flickr who offer their work for public use.  To find out more about a particular photographer, see the credit at bottom of the post.

Any other images were taken by yours truly with a Canon point-and-shoot.  (I know, you can tell.)

Readers: I am grateful to my readers, my friends and my family for making this herculean effort worthwhile.  Blogging is an exciting, self-directed enterprise but it also can be lonely and daunting.  Thank you for your feedback and encouragement.  I write for you!