Sharing your shopping successes = bragging?

Last week, I wrote a post about not comparing your savings percentage with others.  I got a lot of positive feedback about this article, including one anonymous poster who shared the following:

This post is to the point and made me realize that my time/energy is best spent saving enough for ME and MY family and not concerning myself with the overload of blogs out there dedicated to bragging about their percentages off.

This comment got me thinking... are those of us who share our shopping successes bragging about them?

Well, on the one hand, I can see the writer's point.  Just the act of saying, "See, look what I bought!" can seem like bragging to another person who didn't get the same deals, or can't get the same deals. And though my husband is proud of me for trimming our food budget down, sometimes it is nice to share with a community of people who share the same interests in saving that I do, in hopes that I'll get positive feedback from them.  It can be tempting to point out, "Hey!  Look what I did! Aren't I amazing?"  And that can slide into bragging.

But when I check out blogs as I go about my weekly linkups, I find that the blogs I'm most drawn to are those that give personal experience.  There are many blogs that simply list deals and coupons and freebies, and those are certainly helpful.  However,  I don't have as much as an emotional pull toward them.  But when a blogger shows how they used those deals to help their own family, that makes me want to read more and more.  Blogs about saving money just wouldn't be as interesting to me if they didn't contain personal experiences.

I think most bloggers (including myself) don't start their blogs to brag about their success, but to help others.  To show that deals and coupons and freebies aren't just a way to spend less money as an end to itself, but as a means to an end - to help achieve goals.  I think most bloggers want to inspire readers to do the best that they can, so that the readers can achieve their goals, too.

So though I can see that some might see sharing shopping successes as bragging, I don't see it that way.  As long as you're doing it with an eye toward inspiring and helping others, I say, keep sharing!