Sarah Chen

I got serious about frugality in my late twenties after running up almost $40,000 in credit card debt — a number I'm not proud of but am comfortable naming, because I think more people are closer to it than they let on. That experience changed how I think about retail, loyalty programs, and the psychology stores use to separate you from your money.

I've been writing about money and shopping since 2019, initially pseudonymously on personal finance forums, and I still approach every post the way I approached those early threads: assume the reader is smart, skip the condescension, and be specific enough to be useful.

My beats at Frugalissimo are the ones I live: grocery strategy, retail loyalty programs (I have strong opinions about Target Circle that I will defend), subscription audits, and the slow, unsexy work of systematically reducing what you spend on things you already buy. I'm not interested in extreme couponing or making your own laundry detergent. I'm interested in the 20–30% that most households could shave off without changing what they buy — just how and when they buy it.

Based in Brooklyn. I do my own grocery shopping. I've been to seven Costcos in three states. I keep a spreadsheet of every subscription I've cancelled and what it's saved me. When a strategy I've written about stops working, I update the post and say so.