Hi Everyone, sorry for the lack of posts last week. We celebrated James First Birthday (his birthday is on Wednesday) this weekend and prepping for the party kind of took over my life last week.
But I’m back at it. This week and next I’m gonna be blogging about ways that I have found that I can save money with grocery shopping, home items and baby stuff. Also I will cover James’ birthday party and everything that I did for that. So it’s gonna be a busy couple of weeks here at the blog, so lets get at it.
I will preface these blogs with the fact that I am far from an expert on this topics. There are still a lot of ways that I can be better in the topics overall but these are just ways that I have done to save money.
How to Save Money at Home
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| This is not my picture or recipe for the detergent. |
1. DIY Laundry Detergent (here is the recipe and link)- This idea as been around and all over Pinterest for a long time and honestly I never really gave much thought to it until I started losing about 10% of my grocery budget to my laundry detergent at least once a month and it always seemed like I was running out and needed to go the store to get more. I did have some reservation about making my own detergent, Wes, when he was younger, had a allegoric reaction to powder detergent and I wasn’t sure if he still reacted this way or if James would be the same. Luckily my sister has been making her own detergent for awhile and bought my some over a year ago as a thank you gift. So I was able to test it out on our clothes before investing into it. Once I saw that we were in the clear, no reactions, I went out and bought all the ingredients for the detergent.
Savings - Buying all the ingredients plus the bucket and lid costed my about $33 in all. This will get me about 250 loads. I do about 4 loads a week so this should last me over a year. With buying a similar liquid version at the store, 64 loads at 100 oz, I would have to buy 4 containers at $12 a piece for a total of $48. Yearly savings, $15 and not running out in the middle of laundry day.
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| Again, not my picture or box. Right now we have lemon scented. |
2. Powder Dishwasher - This one isn’t a DIY, there are DIY ones out there and maybe I will tip my toe into that but now I just buy the stuff from the store. I made the switch from tablets to just straight powder a couple of months ago, again this was another thing that I felt was eating up my grocery budget and always buying so I looked for a cheaper option. I felt like I was paying for the convenience of the pod. I already add the blue liquid stuff to the dishwasher and do a little prewashing already so I thought why not try the powder.
Savings - I can get about 57 (1.3 oz) dishwashing loads from a 4.5 lbs box for $6 or buy $15 for 67 pods. I will take that $9 savings. I do have pretty hard water so I use a little more. You could get 75 loads if you only use an oz. I say we do about two loads a week, mostly when James is out of dishes, so one big box will get us about 2 months. So yearly savings would be $54.
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| Pulled this from the internet but it's how I feel about bill pay. |
3. Bill Pay- I picked this habit when I was working at the bank. We live in a world that we have many ways to pay our bills - going directly to the place, writing a check, paying through their online website or bill pay. I prefer to pay my bills through bill pay and here is why and how it says me money. When using bill pay versus paying directly on the website, I don’t have to remember a ton of different passwords and usernames and log into a lot of different sites. All I have to do is log into my bank account and select which bills that I would like to pay. I also don’t have to pay for the checks or the stamps to send out the payment. That saves me time and money since I don't’ have to run out to the post office to get stamps. Once I sent submit, I don’t have to worry about it. One more thing that nice about using the bill pay is that it’s safer for you because when you put your payments out in your mailbox, especially overnight, with the red flag saying, ‘hey, I’ve got mail’. It’s a way for bad people to get your account number and your personal information.
Savings - I send out about an average of 6 checks a month, $.47 cents a stamp plus $.10 for the check (that a rough guess) = $.57 or $3.42 a month or $41.04 a year.
4. Using the dishwasher over the sink to clean dishes - This one was a hard one for me to get used to partly because Wes and I went without a dishwashing for such a long time, like almost 3 years. But you use less water by not hand washing all the dishes and that leads to savings in your utilities bill.
Savings - I’m not sure on the exact number on it because there are some many things to fracture into it. But I do know that I don’t go through dishwashing soap as fast so that more money into my pocket.
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| Our local library, isn't she pretty. |
5. Visiting the library - We are very lucky to live less than a mile from the local library. And while I go in spurts from checking out books from the library and I know it has saved me tons of money. I have probably checked out at least 14 audio books from the library and many more real books. When Wes and I were first looking into the idea of homesteading and having chickens, I went to the library and checked out a ton of books. Some were really informative, some not so much. Thats where I very thankful for the library, I always hated it when I bought a book and didn’t like it or couldn’t get into it. With the library, there is nothing lost and I just return it for someone else to love. One of the things that I really like about this library is their hold system, I can place a book on hold and in a couple of days it will be ready for me to pick up, I just go to the front of the library, grab it and check it out.
Savings - Audiobooks are about $20 to buy and I’ve checked out 14 of the them, so I savings from $280. And as far as real books, nonfiction and informational, I would say that number is close to 30 or so if not more. Again, those cost at least $20 so thats another $600. So using the library, it has saved me about $900. Of course, this isn’t in a course of one year but I’m wouldn’t be surprised that with James getting older, we may hit that soon. If i divide $600 by 3 years, about the time that I’ve been using the library, thats about $200 a year.
So just by making these little changes I am able to save about $300 a year. I am actually surprised by this number, I knew it saved me money but I never knew that much. The one that surprised me the most was the dishwashing detergent, $54 extra bucks and it's still named brand too. So long tablets.
What do you do around the house to save you money?
Is there anything that you couldn't give up even if it would save you money?
Later this week, I will go over how a couple of adjustments to my grocery shopping has saved me money.
-Megan
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