This week we spoke with Frugal Babe,  who started a blog to chronicle her family's path out of debt after starting a health insurance agency with her husband. She continues blogging about her frugal tactics and how she incorporates them into daily life.

The Basics:

Name: Frugal Babe
Age: 30
Day Job: I write articles for our business website on a daily basis. I also do all of the accounting, taxes, payroll, etc. for our business. We have an 8-month-old son, and he's my main priority, so I sneak work in around taking care of him.

According to our Stackers:
Household Income: Greater than 74% of Americans.
Rent/mortgage: 30% of Americans pay more in rent.
Student Loan Debt: None! Top percentile.
Credit Card Debt: None! Top percentile.

What are your two favorite financial products? Why?
My two favorite financial products are online bank accounts and our HSA.

1. We use ING for savings, and we have 3 accounts there. One is our emergency fund, another is for a replacement car (we know that ours won't run forever, although we're in no hurry to replace them), and the third is for solar panels that we'd like to install someday. I love the automatic money transfer system, and the fact that once the money is transferred to ING, it's 'out of sight, out of mind'.
2. Our HSA allows us to save money tax-free to use for medical expenses. We have a high deductible on our health insurance ($5,000) and it's comforting to know that the money is there if we need it. The tax-free feature is a huge bonus. And if we don't end up needing the money for medical expenses, the account works like a traditional IRA.

What are you least favorites? Why?
We paid for a program when we bought our house that was supposed to help us pay off the mortgage faster using a combination of a HELOC and a primary mortgage. Basically, it was just a fancy way of paying additional principal, but we forked over $2,500 for this "system." Ouch. That was back in our un-informed days. We pay extra every month on our mortgage and use free online amortization calculators to figure out how long it will take us to pay it off.

The Bigger Picture:

Tell us about your blog.
My blog is all about the ways my husband and I manage to lead a very good life without spending much money. When I stared the blog in the fall of 2006, we were still working to pay off debt that we incurred a few years earlier when we started our own health insurance agency. Since then we've paid off the debt and focused on savings. The only debt we currently have is our mortgage, and we've made it a priority to pay that off as fast as possible. My blog details all the ways - big and small - that we stretch our dollars in order to be able to reach our financial goals and have fun in the process.

What compelled you to start writing your blog?
I started Frugal Babe because I enjoyed reading blogs by other people who were working to get out of debt. At the time, we still had about $5,000 in debt, and I wanted to chronicle our progress at getting rid of it. By the time we did that, the blog had become my pet project, and I continued to write about all the little and big ways that we save money. The blog has evolved over time; it's become very eco-focused, and I like to write about how we integrate frugal living with eco-friendly living.

Ten years down the road — what major PF goals do you hope to have met by then?
Ten years from now, we want to have no debt at all. The mortgage should be gone in less than five years, and we don't want to take on any additional debt. We want to continue saving at least 50% of our income once our mortgage is gone, in order to give us a more flexible future.

What PF achievement are you most proud of?
We're very proud of starting our own insurance agency from scratch and paying off all of the resulting debt within a few years. We're also proud of the fact that we save a good chunk of our income and choose to live well below our means.

Do your family members know about your blog, support it or participate?
My immediate family knows about the blog. My mother reads it every day, and my sister checks it out from time to time. They're all supportive - I come from very frugal stock.

What's a major personal finance issue that is on your mind now?
Paying off our mortgage is the number one priority for us right now, and it's the financial issue we focus on the most. But we're working on lots of other goals at the same time, mostly thanks to automatic savings contributions: saving for a replacement car, solar panels, our son's education, our emergency fund, our HSA, and our retirement accounts.

What products do you really want and/or know you need?
We have pretty much every financial product that we want/need right now. The only thing we don't have is disability insurance, but our business is built on residual commissions, and we would have to have neither of us working at all for several months before we'd see a significant drop in our income. So long term disability is the only thing we really need, and although we know it's a good idea, we haven't gotten it yet.

Thanks, Frugal Babe!