21 Ways We Save Money Every Day
Everybody has a different favorite way to save money. We all think differently and, well you know, two heads are better than one in any given situation.
So I though I would share some of the little ways that we save money every day. It’s amazing how easy it is to let little things slip without realizing how much money they’re costing you!
21 Ways We Save Money Every Day
- Walk (or bike) to the store and post office. (okay, so I don’t go the store daily, but you get the idea)
- Resist the temptation to visit the doughnut shop… most of the time. (it takes me five minutes to walk there – not that I would know from personal experience, right? 😉 )
- Make our own coffee. I don’t personally consume coffee on a regular basis, but my husband does, and I can’t tell you the last time he bought a mug, and how much money that has saved us! When he goes out in the morning to work, his “coffee jar” goes with him!
- Feed leftovers and food scraps to the dog. Thanks for chicken skin, beef, and pork trimmings, our dog doesn’t eat a lot of real dog food, and she’s pretty cheap to keep.
- Feed veggie scraps to the pigs. While having our own pastured pork is nice, it’s unfortunately not much cheaper to feed and butcher hogs than it is to just buy cuts of meat at Kroger or Walmart – which is great incentive to feed every scrap we can to those tinkers to keep the feed bill as low as possible. Not much goes to waste around here – and since we only own a few hogs, the food scraps really do add up to a significant savings.
- Freeze uneaten fruit before it gets too ripe. Frozen fruit makes excellent “nice cream” especially frozen bananas!
- Lookup gas prices on gas buddy.com before making a trip. I’m heading up to Dallas, and I already know that I need to stop in Alvarado for the cheapest gas. Yay!
- Line dry laundry. Okay fine, I don’t actually even own an electric dryer. Seriously, it almost never rains here, so what’s the point? And it keeps our electric bill so low!
- Cook with dry beans instead of canned. They’re so cheap! I usually have a few containers of cooked beans in the freezer for spur of the moment bean dishes.
(Related: how to eat beans for a week without getting bored.) - Google Coupon Codes before placing orders. I always do a few coupon code searches before placing an order online. Sometimes nothing turns up, but other times you’ll find a code for free shipping, or a small percentage discount, so it’s worth it.
- Don’t Use ATMs that aren’t part of our bank’s system. ATM fees = no bueno!
- Turn off A/C to rooms that aren’t being used. In houses with central a/c, this has meant closing off vent, but in this house, it simply means turning off the window unit in our bedroom when we get up in the morning, turning the unit in the living room off when we go to bed at night, etc, and it saves us a lot of money!
- Don’t wash clothes that aren’t soiled. My shirts are almost always dirty after a day of wear, but the same is not true of pants, which are often good for several days in a row. By not washing them so frequently, we save lot of wear and tear on the fabric, which makes them last longer, plus we save a lot of water and laundry soap, so the savings is multi-faceted.
- Cook from scratch. Most of the time, you’ll find very little prepared food in our pantry or refrigerator that isn’t homemade. Ketchup and mustard are pretty much it. Hey, it takes less than two minutes to make homemade mayonnaise, and I can make it so much healthier, so why buy it?
- Line bathroom trash can with plastic shopping bags. Rather than buying trash bags, we recycle, or upcycle grocery bags.
- Wash and reuse Ziplock Bags. I don’t see any reason why I should have to buy new bags when the ones I just emptied are perfectly good for a mother go-round.
- Plan ahead. I’m riding along with hubby tomorrow as he takes some animals to a nearby town, because I need to file some paperwork at the courthouse. That’ll save me five bucks on gas. Little things like that add up in a big way after a while!
- Use my toaster oven. This has been super helpful this summer in keeping the house cool while cooking, and it’s much more economical to heat. I know not everyone can get away with using a tiny oven, but as long as our family is small enough, we really enjoy the savings!
- Use Amazon Subscribe and Save for recurring orders like multi-vitamins for the family. It knocks off 15% of the price, and adds free shipping. Booyah!
- Use half portions of laundry detergent. My understanding is that the main job of laundry detergent is to break the surface tension of the water, so it totally makes sense that you wouldn’t need an entire capful!
- Use cloth diapers. Not anymore! We’ve successfully made the transition to big-girl undies! Woohoo! But over the last four years, using cloth diapers has saved us hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. It’s hard to calculate exactly how much, since I don’t know how many disposable diapers we would have gone through, but we had under $300 invested in cloth. Or perhaps I should say that we has under $300 worth of cloth diapers since many of them were baby shower gifts. Umm, that’s $75 a year for diapers. Doesn’t get much better than that!
The long and the short of it is, I don’t really do anything super extraordinary. There’s nothing earth shattering on that list.
But all those little things add up into big savings after a while. Really big savings! Even just making our own coffee over the tiny convenience of picking it up at a drive-through saves us several hundred dollars a year.
These are all easy little things that you can do too, with very little effort. Maybe there are even more little ways you can find to save money on a regular basis. the savings add up, and it’s worth it!
Your turn: What are some of the ways you save money on a regular basis?
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Great list! We don’t have any satellite or cable TV. We watch very little TV here; if we want to watch something, we watch what we can find on the Internet, and hook it up to our TV screen. Also, this is akin to your #17 – we live in town where we can get most things we need, but sometimes we need things from the city that is 45-60 minutes away. So we keep a running list of those items and then just make one bigger day-trip about once a month, instead of going every week. Also like your #1, my husband *tries* to bike to work every day; since I don’t drive right now, the vehicle doesn’t get used while he works! 🙂 We also very, very rarely go out to eat and neither of us are coffee-drinkers, we use grocery bags in our trash can, freeze cheese, veggies, and sauces so they don’t go bad, *try* not to use ATM’s if they’re not our banks’, wear our clothes (for sure pants/skirts) as long as we can before washing, use the toaster oven for small food items, and don’t use as much laundry detergent as the package says. We also use cold water for all laundry. But the only reason I line-dry anything is because my husband and I are tall and hate short clothes, lol!
I have found that it is not what you do. but what you don’t do that saves you alot of money. Learning to say no to yourself and is a biggie. I started bringing a thermos of coffee to work from home. And was actually surprised at how much i was spending on take out coffee. Great article.
So true!
Instead of a toaster oven, we use a solar oven in the summertimes.
Great idea!