Saving Families Money Since 2007
Today’s question is from Amy:
We’ve never spent much on kid’s clothing before since we were blessed with lots of hand-me-downs. However, we are planning to purchase some clothing for our two-year-old daughter at local consignment stores and I’m wondering: what is a reasonable budget for a couple of seasons’ worth of children’s clothing?
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Guest post from Nancy of Counting Dollars and In the Black
As a single person, I’ve learned many ways to save money on groceries. Here are three of my favorites:
As a single person, I eat mostly home-cooked meals but I don’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My secret? Freezer cooking! When I make a meal, if it is freezable, I freeze it in individual portions to either eat another evening or take for lunch the next day.
Here are some of the meals I make in larger quantities and freeze in individual servings for lunch or dinner:
Another dilemma for those cooking for one or two is worrying about ingredients going to waste. Many things can be frozen and used when you need them. Some of the items I freeze and take out as I need them are:
This past summer, I subscribed to a CSA group (Consumer Supported Agriculture) and have subscribed again this year. In our case, we pay a monthly fee the first part of the year and for five months during the summer we receive a weekly box of produce. Besides the weekly boxes we also have opportunities to pick more of certain items.
The half share box I got is meant to be enough for two people and comes to about $80/month. I froze some of the extras and what I picked.
Now, several months later, I have needed to buy very few vegetables because of what I have in my freezer. Last summer, some people were wondering if the CSA fee was worth the money to me, but for $20 per week I have vegetables all summer and most of the winter.
Nancy Kvamme has spent several years learning about ways to make her money go further and now wants to help others through her blogs, Counting Dollars and In the Black. Nancy also feels it is important to teach kids about money and finances before they get out on their own. She enjoys traveling, which is easier to budget for when finding ways to save money on everyday expenses.
I am wondering if you have any tips for how to be an effective couponer without it taking over your life! I am about to have my fourth baby and for most of this pregnancy I have totally fallen off the coupon bandwagon because I just can’t seem to keep up the schedule of clipping, organizing, coupon train, printing coupons, planning weekly shopping trips, and so on.
I can’t seem to find the balance between “all” and “nothing”! I’m not opposed, in my mind, to a happy medium, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do that, practically speaking. -Kiersten
Thanks for asking such an excellent questions, Kiersten! Here are some of my thoughts:
There are seasons of life when I can focus more seriously on couponing. There are other seasons when using coupons takes a back burner.
It sounds like you have a lot on your plate right now, so I just want to encourage you not to stress too much over always getting the lowest price on everything. Do the best you can do with the time and energy you have and don’t worry about the deals you’re missing out on. Your health and sanity is worth more than saving a few dollars.
If you don’t have a lot of time, focus your dollars on stocking up on the best deals that can be frozen or have a long shelf life. Instead of worrying about getting those 35 different decent deals, pick 2-4 really exceptional deals and buy extras of those. While you might still end up paying full price for things sometimes, by getting 60-75% of your groceries at exceptional deals, you’ll still come out way ahead.
If the majority of the meals you make are really inexpensive, you’ll save a lot of money–without even using coupons! Make a list of some of your family’s favorite inexpensive meals and use this list as a go-to when you are short on time and energy and just don’t feel like messing with coupons.
If you’re finding it exhausting to shop at more than one store, consider price-matching the best deals from your local store at Walmart. This way, you’re still getting great deals, but it’s less time-consuming.
1. Print great coupons as they become available throughout the week. I don’t print all the coupons that I post, only those that I know will be a good deal at the stores I regularly frequent.
2. When I’m ready to plan my menu (usually on Saturday or Sunday), I quickly review the printed coupons and divvy them up by store.
3. Then, I glance through my local store’s sale fliers, what coupons I’ve already printed, what I already have on hand, and inspiration from Pinterest and jot down a basic menu plan for the week.
4. While I’m planning the weekly menu, I also make a grocery list at the same time.
5. After I’ve planned the menu and grocery list, I double-check my store’s coupon match-ups to see if there are any deals I’ve missed or coupons I’ve forgotten to print.
6. Then I take the jotted down list of groceries I need to buy, look at my schedule and tentatively plan when and where I’ll do my grocery shopping that week. I don’t always follow this perfectly, but having a rough plan in place that I’ll swing by Walgreens when I’m my way to something else, or that I’ll block out an hour to hit three stores on Tuesday helps me to stay organized and on track during the week.
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You can save so much money off your grocery bill by cooking from scratch. However, if you’re cooking from scratch solely for the purpose of saving money (not for the health benefits or because you enjoy it), make sure it’s worth the return on your investment of time.
If you spend hours in the kitchen and it’s only saving you a $1 or so per hour to make things from scratch, it’s likely not worth your time. That’s why I don’t make homemade tortillas.
I have a personal policy that I must be saving at least $20 per hour to invest my time in any money-saving tactic. This helps me to focus my energy and effort on those things that are really going to make a difference in our budget, instead of exerting half a day on something that really doesn’t change our bottom line.
{Freezer-Friendly Breakfast Burritos}
It’s easy to think that cooking from scratch has to be a huge time investment, but that’s often not the case. In fact, in 10 minutes, you can easily throw a big batch of beans in the crockpot to cook and a loaf of bread in the bread machine.
You’ll never know how much time something will take you or how much you’ll enjoy making it until you’ve actually experimented with it. So go ahead, try making homemade refried beans, homemade go-gurts, freezer-friendly breakfast burritos, homemade baking mix, or homemade pizza.
Constantly be looking for ways to make the best use of your time in the kitchen. If you love frozen waffles and you’re already going to be working on another project in the kitchen, go ahead and whip up a triple batch of homemade frozen waffles to be cooking while you’re working on your other project(s). When your other projects are done, you’ll also have a few bags of waffles to pop in the freezer for quick and easy breakfasts in the next few weeks.
Find more Supermarket Savings Tips here.
On Thursday on our trip to the Dominican Republic, we visited an urban slum in downtown Santo Domingo. What we saw and experienced was shocking–and yet heart-warming.
{I wish I could have taken my camera to capture the scenes for you, but we’d decided to leave it behind as it was a somewhat dangerous situation for Americans to go into these slums. We found out later that one of the men who showed up while we were visiting was actually one of the city’s most dangerous criminals–a man who has an alliance with the police and therefore never gets punished for any of his deeds because he just pays them money to overlook his criminal actions. Our guide was incredibly grateful that I hadn’t brought the camera as he felt there was a good chance it would have put us in a great deal of danger!}
To even reach where the people lived, you had to go through this very small and long concrete corridor in between two stores. At the back, we ducked under laundry hanging out and entered a concrete broken down dwelling that looked like it hadn’t seen anything clean in decades. It reeked of years’ worth of dirty laundry piles mixed with sweat.
Inside this smelly, dirty, concrete dwelling was a beautiful woman. To most people, she wouldn’t appear all that beautiful from the outside. Her teeth were mostly missing and what was left of them were rotted and brown. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a very long time. Her clothes were dirty, extremely worn out, and stained.
But she was a beautiful woman regardless of her outward appearances because she radiated with contentment. Her living conditions were appalling. She was in charge of caring for some of her grandchildren because her daughter has been sick for years. Her son is a high profile criminal. And she is unable to find work and relies on the kindness of others for support.
Despite all her struggles, she was so joyful. Instead of giving in to hopelessness and despair, she was telling us how she’s trying to reach out and help others.
And then, she asked if she could pray for us. I was moved to tears.
Here was this woman who has practically nothing and she’s asking to pray for us!
I wish you could have heard her prayer. It was powerful and filled with praise to the Lord, thanking Him for bringing us to visit her and asking that God would bless us.
After we gave her a box of staple supplies and prayed for her, I hugged her and thanked her profusely for letting us come. While we came to reach out to her, we left the ones who were ministered to.
If she can be joyful, content, and giving in such an awful situation in life, I have no excuse to ever complain again.
{This picture is of one of the other families we visited on our trip. All six of them live in this house and it wasn’t much bigger than what you see here. I was so impressed with the girl on the left. She had so much drive and potential: she’s working at the supermarket and going to the university to study accounting and hoping to get a job in the accounting field once she graduates.}
Guest post from Angela
I’ve always said you could eat healthy on a budget, but in February, I decided to actually live out that belief. For an entire month, I decided I would shop, cook, and eat as a vegan. Our monthly budget of $350 for a family of four would stay the same, and my kids would continue to eat some dairy and meat.
Not only did we meet our budget for the month, we actually came $23 under budget! Today I wanted to share with you some of what I learned about saving money on a whole-foods, plant-based diet. Especially since much of what I learned could be useful for any diet.
I began by collecting vegan cookbooks from my library, building a Pinterest board, and finding vegan blogs to follow. At the start of each week, I would come up with 4 or 5 recipes for dinners. I would then turn the meal plan into a shopping list, and add in breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.
For the most part, I avoided pre-packaged and convenience foods. Instead, I learned how to make my own foods including almond milk and vegetable broth. Not only did this save money, it was more nutritious.
If you’ve never paid attention to the bulk foods section of your grocery or health food store, give it a chance! It’s a great way to save when you just need small amounts of a particular ingredient (or large amounts). For example, we spent about $1.60 for a decent sized bag of steel cut oats, $0.08 for the fennel seed I needed to make vegan sausages, and about $0.50 for a few dried apricots for a couscous recipe.
My husband and I recently started applying Dave Ramsey’s cash envelope method for budgeting our groceries. Can I tell you what a difference this has made? When you realize that all you have to buy your food is the cash in your wallet, you make better decisions. I found myself filling up my cart with produce and whole grains first. I also found that shopping with cash made me want to choose the foods that were most nutritionally dense and that could stretch our dollar further.
When I limit my shopping to just one day per week, it becomes clearer to me which deals will really benefit my family most, and which I can pass by. Shopping once a week also helps me stick to my meal plan! See how all these things begin to work in concert?
Here’s an added bonus: for the month of February, we spent well under half of what we usually do eating out! Whether or not you are a vegan, I challenge you to implement some of what I learned above into your own routine.
Angela lives with her firefighter husband and two children, Keefe, and Piper, in Tacoma, Washington. She hasn’t gone back to eating meat or dairy yet…
Done-For-You Dinner Recipes With Simple Ingredients and a Grocery Shopping List!
Thrice The Spice shows you how to make homemade mocha drink mix.
Do you have a fun and frugal DIY idea to share? I’d love to hear about it! Read the submission guidelines and submit it here.
I woke up to a very messy house today. After being gone all last week and taking Sunday to just rest and reconnect with family, I was met with real-life this morning: unwashed dishes in the sink, dirty laundry to be done, suitcases to be unpacked, and stuff strewn about.
As I thought about how I was going to attack the piles, I realized that the same plan of attack could be applied to finances:
Truthfully, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by how bad the mess was–especially with everything else I needed to accomplish today. However, I quickly realized that being overwhelmed would do nothing to fix the issue.
In the same way, if you find yourself in a huge hole financially, panicking won’t do anything to improve the situation.
Once I got over being so overwhelmed, I created a game plan: I surveyed the whole house and realized that the mess really just concentrated in the kitchen and bedroom areas. So I carved out a block of time during the day when I would devote my sole attention to dealing with the mess.
If you want to achieve success in your finances, it’s imperative to have a game plan. Dreaming and wandering around in circles doesn’t accomplish anything. Consider where you want to be financially in a year, two years, or five years from now. Write those goals down onto paper and figure out what changes you’re going to make in your life to help you get where you want to go.
After I blocked out the time to focus on the messy areas of my home, I divided those areas up by sections, set the timer, and got to work. Instead of trying to tackle entire rooms, I focused on specific areas one at a time. This made it much more manageable.
A game plan is great, but if you don’t break your big idea down into bite-sized pieces you’ll probably find it’s just too hard. Simplify your game plan by breaking it down into yearly, monthly, and weekly goals. That way, you’re not trying to scale a mountain in one leap; you’re just focusing on the next few steps in front of you.
I had hoped to knock out all of the messes in an hour or so. But it seems things always take longer than I hope. I got distracted, children needed help, and things came up. But by continuing to plod on, even when it was slower than I’d hoped, I finally finished and had almost everything cleaned up and put away by the time Jesse got home from work tonight.
When you’re working toward financial goals, you’re almost guaranteed to have unexpected things come up: job loss, extra expenses, cars that break down, medical bills, and more. It’s easy to get discouraged and want to give up when it seems like the going is so slow. But press on and remember that moving forward–even at a microscopic rate–is still moving forward!
Ah! So much better!
One thing that has saved us a lot of money over the years is for me to calculate the cost of recipes when planning menus. If I know that there’s a $5 difference in price between one dinner and another dinner, I can save our family a quick $5 just by choosing the less expensive meal.
To easily calculate the cost of recipes, you can download this free downloadable Recipe Cost Calculator Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet allows you to plug in ingredient costs and recipe measurements and instantly have a final cost or a cost per serving.
If you really want to make things cost-effective and streamlined, make a list of recipes your family loves sorted by price. That way, if you are really strapped for wiggle room in your budget, you can stick with those recipes that are your least expensive and save the more expensive recipes for when you have a little more breathing room.
By the way, if your grocery budget is really tight right now, you might find the Hillbilly Housewife’s Emergency $45 Menu Plan helpful and inspiring.
Find more Supermarket Savings Tips here.
Since we were gone almost all of last week, I didn’t set any goals, other than just focusing on the people in the Dominican Republic. I did get some reading in and a few other projects done on the plane, but that was about it. And that was okay, because there were more important things happening last week than crossing goals off my list!
But this week, it’s back life and goal-setting!
Goals from two weeks ago:
Family/Mothering Goals
1. Finish reading Corrie Ten Boom aloud to the children.
2. Continue our Countdown to Easter study as a family.
3. Write a love note to Jesse.Personal Goals
4. Finish reading Leadership As An Identity.
5. Complete week 7 of the Couch to 5K program.
6. Listen to at least one more hour of The 10 Habits of Happy Mothers.
7. Write two handwritten notes.Home Management
8. Clean out and organize our bathroom drawers.
9. Finish Andalutheean Knitted Dishcloth.Business Goals
10. Outline my talk for the MomLife Bootcamp in March.
This week’s goals:
Family/Mothering Goals
1. Finish reading Nate Saint plus read three chapters of Quest for Truth:Taken aloud to the children.
2. Continue our Countdown to Easter study as a family.
3. Write a love note to Jesse.
Personal Goals
4. Finish reading One of Us Must Be Crazy and I’m Pretty Sure It’s You, Unshaken: Rising From the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana, and Dawn of a Thousand Nights.
5. Complete week 8 of the Couch to 5K program.
6. Listen to at least one more hour of The 10 Habits of Happy Mothers.
7. Make a plan for Spring Cleaning our house.
Home Management
8. Clean out and organize all our homeschool stuff.
Business Goals
9. Host a reader meet-up in Texas (we still have a few more spots available if you haven’t RSVP’d yet!).
10. Finish my talk & Powerpoint for the MomLife Bootcamp at the end of this week.
How did you do on last week’s goals? What are your goals for this week? I’d love to have you share your progress on last week’s goals and your goals for this coming week in the comments. Of, if you’ve blogged about it, leave your direct link below. Let’s cheer each other on to live purposeful and productive lives!
You can download a free customizable weekly goal-planning sheet here.
After spending time with the children in the Child Sponsorship Program on Thursday, we served them lunch and then headed to meet with a local pastor who was involved in this Child Sponsorship Program. He showed us some of the amazing outreach opportunities his church is spearheading in their community.
One of them is this Water Store that Debbie, a woman who is on this trip with us, helped to fund. The store has a water purification plant that provides water to their church, the Child Sponsorship Program, as well as providing a very inexpensive source of water for this community.
{Piles of trash like this were very common in many of the places we visited.}
There is a huge need for clean water in almost all parts of the DR, but it can be expensive to have to purchase all of the water. The Water Store offers water at about half the price of what you’d pay elsewhere, so people from all over come to buy it!
What I loved most about the Water Store is that it is self-sustaining and income-producing. So not only is it helping to increase the health of thousands of families in this community through clean water and providing the water at a great price, but it’s also creating a source of income for a number of families, too.
The Water Store is staffed by four employees, plus there are many people who buy the water in bulk and have set up numerous distribution points in outlying areas. In this urban area where jobs are very scarce, the Water Store is helping to provide an income source to many, many families!
They are currently planning to expand the store because the demand is so great. By expanding, they will also be able to supply many more distribution points and provide even more revenue for more families.
What we were most inspired by was how hard this local pastor and church was working to reach out to those in their community. In addition to the Child Sponsorship Program and the Water Store, they offer a medical clinic, classes for the local public school students, retreats for young people. They are also actively working on setting up a vocational school for their community with plans to offer English classes, computer classes, vocational classes, and more in order to help those in their community find jobs.
They had so little themselves, and yet they were doing all they could to help those who were in much worse situations. It was so convicting to me to see firsthand!
Maybe you don’t have money to invest in something like a Water Store, but I want to challenge you to follow the example of this pastor and think about what you can do to bring health and hope to those in your own community–and around the world. We all have something we can give, even if it’s just a cup of cold water to someone who is begging on the streets.
Start looking for opportunities to reach out and give and you’ll likely find them all around you!
Tomorrow, I’ll share about our experiences visiting the slums in Santo Domingo. It was definitely a life-impacting experience for both my husband and me!
Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie — yum!
I’m headed to speak the MomLife Bootcamp Friday through Sunday of this week, so I’m planning some simple meals for when I’m gone and hoping to have the freezer stocked with some quick snacks to grab, too.
Here’s this week’s menu plan:
Breakfasts
Granola bars (on the way to church!)
Oatmeal, fresh carrot/apple/orange juice
Scrambled eggs, fruit
Lemon Cornmeal Pancakes (I’m planning to sub coconut flour for the flour in this recipe.), fruit
Cereal x 3Lunches
Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie, salad
Pumpkin Apple Pie Muffins, Hard-boiled eggs, veggies
Kiwi Avocado Green Tea and Coconut Shake, Skinny Monkey Cookies
Homemade Carrot Chips, Rice & beans
Salmon, veggies, fruit, corn chips
Leftovers x 2Dinners
Build-Your-Own Haystacks
Marinated chicken, steamed veggies, fruit salad, rice
Goulash, tossed salad
Hamburgers, potatoes, steamed veggies, fruit
Dinner with extended family x 2
Dinner outFreezer Cooking
Skinny Monkey Cookies
Raw Cookie Dough Bites
5 Minute Reese’s Peanut Butter Bars
What’s on your menu this week? Share details and/or your link to your menu plan in the comments.
Guest post from Mandi
It is almost time for me to renew our family’s Sam’s Club membership. We are in the middle of Dave Ramsey’s Baby Step 2, and so everything that can be cut is getting cut. Here are some questions I came up with to assess our current need for a warehouse membership card:
I have started asking myself this question about all of my purchases, and it has made a big difference. When you shop at a warehouse store, are you buying items just because they are available and a “great deal”, or because you actually need them?
This was the big question for me this year. The number one item our household purchases at Sam’s Club is gasoline. My husband drives just shy of 90 miles, round trip, for work. We have a Sam’s Club literally right around the corner from us that has a gas station. It averages a minimum of $0.10 less than any other nearby gas station, or approximately 3% cheaper. Since we always fill up at Sam’s Club, we are saving 3% of our gas budget, or $108 annually.
If it is diapers and wipes you buy most often, then you might be able to get a better deal on Amazon with Amazon Mom Deals. As with any item, you have to pick and choose your deals.
Sam’s Club usually has a “free” weekend sometime in April and August where anyone can come in and shop. They do this to get you to sign-up for a membership. However, as Crystal has mentioned, you can use this as an opportunity to stock up for the year on things like yeast, chocolate chips, flour, and other items that truly are cheaper at a warehouse store.
True, that giant can of olives may be 10 cents cheaper per ounce than the can at the regular grocery store, but if you end up throwing away three-quarters of something, then you are not saving any money. {Note from Crystal: Make sure to follow the advice in this post to help you not waste items you buy in bulk.}
The key to saving money on warehouse club memberships is to be totally objective when you are evaluating your needs. Do the math – see if it makes sense on paper.
For us, it does make sense to keep our membership, at least for the time being since I know we save over $100 per year, and our membership cost $40. However, I am aware this may not always be the case, and if circumstances change, then I will reevaluate our needs.
Mandy White is a stay-at-home wife and mama to three wonderful children, and the most amazing man. She loves to learn, and is constantly working on new domestic experiments, like canning, and freezer cooking. Her favorite time of year is Fall – which doesn’t start in Arizona until November.
I’ve been so busy with activities in the Dominican Republic the past few days that I haven’t had much more than a few minutes to log onto the computer. And when I could log in, my internet was extremely slow & sketchy. There’s so much to share from what we’ve experienced and so many pictures I want to post, that it’s probably going to take me at least five more days to try and scratch the surface of all I want to share!
On Thursday, we visited a Child Sponsorship Program in Santo Domingo. The children were older (ages 11-15) and they didn’t warm up to us as quickly as they did on Tuesday.
However, after playing some rousing outdoor games and sitting in their classroom and asking them questions about their home, parents, food, and life in general, they began to slowly warm up. And once they warmed up, they just ate up our love and affection.
This little boy, Darius, stole my heart. He said he didn’t ever know who his father was and, from the questions I asked, it sounds like he lives in very primitive conditions.
He was starving to just have someone look into his eyes and tell him he was loved, cared for, and valuable. He drew me this picture to take home, but honestly, I just wanted to take him home with me!
I’m so grateful that he’s part of the Child Sponsorship Program and is getting regular meals, education, attention, love, clothes and shoes, and medical help as part of the program. I truly don’t think I could have left without knowing he was going to be taken care of!
While the children were waiting for lunch to be served, I showed them pictures of my children and introduced them to Fruit Ninja–a game on my phone that my daughter loves. They were mesmerized and I didn’t even have to explain to them how to play the game; they got it right off!
Even though most of these children come from very deplorable home situations, they are bright, cheerful, industrious, and intelligent. And with the right education and encouragement, they are going to go so far in life!
{This home–a very nice one for this area–was available to rent for the equivalent of around $1 per month!}
I’ve appreciated Compassion’s Child Sponsorship Program the past four years that we’ve been involved in it, but now that I’ve seen the work firsthand, I’m a hundred times more excited about the work they are doing.
Most of these children come from homes that have little joy and comfort in them. They spoke of fights, disease, family problems, and lack of parental involvement when we asked them specific questions about their living conditions.
The pain on their faces as they shared broke my heart. I wanted to scoop them all up, take them home with me, and provide a safe haven with plenty of food, clothes and shoes, a soft bed, medical care, and lots and lots of love.
I can’t bring them all home with me, but by investing $38 per month, I can provide all of that for one child who is in Compassion’s Child Sponsorship Program. If you don’t already support a child through Compassion’s Child Sponsorship Program, may I encourage you to prayerfully consider it?
The $38 per month commitment amount might seem outside your budget right now, but maybe there are some things you can cut from your budget in order to free up the funds? Or maybe you could partner with some other families and pool together your money to be able to support a child. I promise that it will be worth it.
If you don’t feel led to support children through Compassion or you just truly don’t have any extra room in your barebones budget–that’s completely okay! I don’t share this with you to guilt you into doing something that’s not what God is calling you to do.
That said, I want to encourage you to do something. Find a single mom in your neighborhood who could use a bag of groceries that you got for free with coupons. Find an elderly couple who could use assistance or friendship. Donate some supplies to your local homeless center or work in a nearby soup kitchen. Write a letter of encouragement. Be a listening ear. Freely share your knowledge and experience with others.
Step outside your comfort zone, give freely and generously of your resources and time, and live your life with arms outstretched. And I promise you’ll be blessed beyond what you can imagine!
On Monday, I’ll share about the Water Store Project and, if I have space, I’ll also include details and photos from the slums we visited. I can’t wait to share more as my heart is just about bursting right now!
I bought Leadership As An Identity after hearing its author, Crawford Loritts, speak at an event last year. It has sat on the shelf for a number of months untouched. I finally picked it up again at the end of last year and decided to add it to the list of 24 Books I Plan to Read in 2012. I’m so glad I added it to the list because I found it to be very beneficial.
This book focuses on the heart issues of what constitutes a strong leader, while also giving practical suggestions and examples. I appreciated the emphasis on humility and was especially challenged by his words on brokenness.
I’d highly recommend this book if you are in any kind of leadership position–or hope to be someday!
Have you read any good books recently?