8 Ways We Saved Money In January
Finding ways to save money here and there can be hard, and I think we can all use a little inspiration now and then in our lives, so every month this year, I plan to publish some of the things we did to stay within our budget during the previous month.
It’s always nice to see money still in your budgeting envelopes at the end of the month.
I was feeling really good about the money we didn’t spend this month… Right up until my first dentist appointment… and then the second. Ouch! Why didn’t I take better care of my teeth as a child?! Those bad habits have come back to haunt me as I’m getting teeth that were first filled when I was eight years old redone!
Hot frugal tip of the day: Take care of your teeth!
Fortunately, along with continuing with many of the ways we saved in December, we were able to save money in other areas, and here’s how:
Eight Ways We Saved Money In January
- We rode our bicycles and walked whenever possible. The post office and grocery store both got visits from at least one of us on foot or by bike this month. I love that we’ve had enough mild weather to accommodate that!
- Hauled “compost” (aged manure) from a local dairy for our garden. I think the garden store in a nearby town sells it in bags, and I have no idea how much it costs, but the fuel savings of not having to drive that far along was worth getting our hands dirty! (isn’t gardening all about getting your hands dirty anyway?)
- Got most of our produce for free. You can read about how to get free produce here.
- I shopped on eBay. I had to get a few little gadgets and find the best prices on eBay. Don’t you just love the internet age?!
- I used Amazon gift cards to buy other things I needed. Last month, I noted that we used Swagbucks for a restaurant gift card; this month, it was from Amazon. Swagbucks = free money for Amazon = yay!
- Downloaded Spotify to our Kindle. It took me forever to finally do this because I hate cluttering up devices with a lot of apps. I can’t really say that it saved me money because I wouldn’t have bought CDs (at least not right now), but I sure did want to! And it’s really nice to have an almost endless selection of music at my fingertips. How do I get them to add Hide ‘em in Your Heart volume 2?? 😉
- Picked up pecans from neighborhood trees. We have two native pecan trees of our own, which is awesome! But since our neighbors don’t like pecans and gave us permission to pick theirs up, and they’re twice as big as ours, we haven’t really picked any of our own up. How backward is that?!
- Ate lots of beans. We love homemade hummus around here. I like to use it as a veggie dip, but my husband just eats it with a spoon! We also made a bunch of refried beans, and Garrett requests bean and cheese quesadillas for lunch nearly every day. Suits me!
We’ve had a lot of fun this month. Nothing special really happened, but we’ve really enjoyed just being together, playing, working, hanging out in the house on cold days, and going for bike rides when it’s warm.
And honestly, it’s been a lot of fun challenging myself to get creative with my money-saving strategies.
So, how have you been saving money these days?
Wednesdays is trash pickup around here. We like to drive around before it is picked and to see what we can find on the curb. We’ve scored a lot of stuff for our grandchildren like toddler beds, a Little Tikes Cottage, a Little Tikes castle and slide, a plastic play kitchen, and riding toys galore. We also subscribe to Craigslist Free in our area and picked up things like 8 ft. boards and a swingset. We did have to cut the rusted hardware off the swingset and replace it, but it was well worth the effort for a slide, three swings, glider, and merry go round. The hardware cost about $10.
We built a sandbox for our grandchildren from reclaimed 2×6 boards. We used a reclaimed trampoline mat for the bottom and wrapped the wood for splinter free fun.
We’ve also used the reclaimed wood for building a kayak rack, building a compost bin, making stands for the rain barrels, making an A frame for the vegetables to climb.