About FMs

Frugal Moms in 2002

Once upon a time, there was a website called Frugal Moms. I started it back in 1998, when the internet was pretty young and blogging wasn't even a word! I built it from scratch, cobbling it together with the best tools and scripts I had at the time. It was time consuming and expensive, but it was a labor of love. The site grew huge and gained national recognition as a place where people could learn to "live better for less". We were featured on national tv and in newspapers across the country.

The community grew to over 8000 members and consumed insane amounts of bandwidth and attention. I was able to keep it all going and keep it free for the first three and a half years, until the bottom fell out of internet advertising in 2001. The dotcom bubble had burst, and 9-11 happened soon after. In 2002, I offered memberships as a way to keep the site going, since our ad revenue had evaporated. That didn't work too well. My insane hours on the site took its toll on my health and my marriage. I retired in 2003 to try and save them both.

The good news is, my health survived, but unfortunately my marriage did not. The past few years have been a wild ride and have challenged me in so many ways, especially financially. I never thought I'd be online again, but friends have encouraged me to dust off the archives and repost some of my old articles. I am happy to do that, though some of them need major revisions. (I also got tired of looking for my favorite recipes and tips from my old website! I wanted to be able to access them without bumbling through a million folders- paper and virtual!)

The Frugal Moms Welcome Center on our Forums, decked out for spring. We had well over 100 forums and were an extremely active community!

You can find many of my old articles by googling "Kim Tilley" and "Frugal Moms". I will be posting them here as I update them again. If there's something you're looking for, let me know and I'll try to get it up asap. You can find many of my articles along with plenty of others at my friend Douglas' site, Fractured Frugal Friends. Many of our forum members migrated over there as well.

In the meantime, please bear with me. I work full time and have five kids now. They keep me hopping! You can read more about them here.

I've sworn never to have the huge behemoth of code and maintenance I used to, but so much has changed online! Tools are simpler, faster and bandwidth is way cheaper. I'm keeping it simple. I don't ever want to be as burnt out as I was when I retired. I really don't know if I'll ever get the domain frugal-moms.com or frugalmoms.com back...

Um....Probably not. I just looked and someone wants $42,000 for the frugalmoms.com domain. What a riot! I know we generated some GREAT traffic back in the day, but that's ridiculous! Don't they know frugal people don't spend that kind of money on domain names??? (Actually we rarely, if ever, spend that kind of money on anything!)

Maybe they need that money for whatever they are smoking...

After I picked myself off the ground and stopped laughing, I looked at this place and smiled. It's enough for now. If anything else is meant to be, it'll happen. If not, I've got this little blog. Sometimes bigger isn't always better, and less really is more!

Enjoy!
 Kim :)