I’ve been reading a lot of frugal living books lately. Not only because I’ve always been drawn to a more frugal, simple living-type lifestyle, but these days, saving our pennies is a must. Instead of telling you which books I found useful, though, I thought I would share things that our family actually does to help save money or at least be more conscientious spenders:
Use mint.com. This is free, online software that you load all of your accounts into (don’t worry, it’s fully secure!), and then they keep track of every (non-cash) transaction and make nifty graphs of your spending.
Read Your Money or Your Life
We’ve brought this up before, but it is a great book for helping identify your financial and work goals, and cutting down on excess.
Clip coupons…sometimes. I check the weekly grocery store ads, Thrifty NW Mom (a good round-up of deals site, sadly with a sexist name as my SAH dad friend pointed out), and am willing to sign up to receive emails from companies I know I always purchase from. The tricky thing to watch out for with coupons, though, is that I find they’re often for convenience or packaged foods, or for things that we don’t buy anyway. And I say sometimes because trying to track down coupons for everything we buy would be super time-consuming.
Meal plan & grocery shop weekly. We get a weekly farm box of organic produce (and to be truthful, I get this for free as a work perk – woot!). Knowing what produce we have on hand for the week makes meal planning easy once you get the hang of it. It takes Todd and me about 10 minutes to create a menu, and then the aim is to go grocery shopping once that week; less time in the grocery store equals less opportunity to impulse-buy (and also equals more family time dontcha know).
Shop at different stores. The above being said, I will split my one shopping list between stores if it makes sense. This week, for example, I went to QFC for two meat items that were on a great sale, but didn’t buy the rest of my list there because they tend to have higher prices in general. Also going to different stores allows you to check out what prices they have on staples. The Tightwad Gazette suggests making a price notebook to keep track of who always has the cheapest prices on such-and-such, which would be handy, but my impressionistic way works okay for now.
Cook whole foods. It takes more time and effort to prepare and cook meals from scratch, but then you also know exactly what’s in them. It’s also cheaper! We do buy some prepared things (such as beans — I can’t seem to perfect cooking dried; and my achilles heel, boxed cereal…), but try to buy mostly whole foods. Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking with Whole Foods is a resourceful cookbook on how to get started. Oh, and a random tip: buy spices from the bulk foods section! never buy them in a jar!!!1
Use substitutes in the kitchen. We consistently substitute coconut milk for heavy cream in soup recipes; 1 TBSP of vinegar + milk to equal one cup as a sub for 1 cup of buttermilk; plain yogurt instead of sour cream; better than bouillon instead of packaged stock (on my wish list is to make our own stock from scratch). While sour cream isn’t that expensive, it’s one more thing to buy, and then have to use up in order to not waste it. There is A LOT of molded sour cream in our past…
Hit up the bread outlet store. Also on my wish list is making our own bread, but in the meantime I stock up on many loaves at a time from the Oroweat or Franz outlet, and freeze what we’re not going to use right away. Seriously, I get angry if I somehow run out and have to buy a loaf at the grocery store.
Skip the memberships. No netflix, no gym, no Costco. I ask to go with my parents to Costco :] Oh, but if we weren’t already getting a produce box, we would strongly consider joining a CSA — the savings are pretty good, and the veggies are great!
No home phone, no cable tv. I’ve heard that you’re supposed to have a home phone for kids to be able to call 911 in an emergency. When Seth is older, we may revisit this, but for now, cell phones are it. And we don’t miss cable at all; hulu.com or borrowing whole seasons of dvds works better for us anyway. (Actually, I miss watching cooking shows and Shark Week, and Todd misses watching sports, but we get over it.)
Keep a timer in the shower. Okay, so this hasn’t necessarily saved us money yet, but it definitely makes us conscious of our (…high) water usage. And I’ll remind myself here that cutting one minute off your shower time can save about 700 gallons of water per month. Yeesh!
Change our own oil. We also haven’t seen savings from this yet, but I just learned how a month ago as a Christmas gift, and we have been bad about proper car maintenance in the past. So I know it will pay off in the long term…
Wash full loads of laundry. Other than items that could be ruined or bleed onto other stuff, everything (barring diapers) gets thrown into the wash together. Sorting colors is for the birds.
Cloth diaper. It’s a little gross, but so worth the effort.
Pay bills on time, don’t carry credit card debt. Our past regarding the latter is not blemish-free, but we now know that it makes no sense to pay for the opportunity to buy something.
Use the library. Our ever-present stack of checked out books, magazines, board books, cd’s, comics, etc, averages about 8 feet tall. Our spending on media is usually only the cost of late fees (Psst, see the tip above this one! Yes, but we can make an exception because the late fees benefit the library…)
Hopefully some of these were helpful and not too obvious. Are there some things that you do to save money? Please comment; I love finding more easy things to slip into our routine!
