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Over the weekend we attended a birthday party with a few family friends.  It was such a good time!  The kids spent hours in the pool not fighting while the grown ups enjoyed good food, a few drinks, and fun conversation (at each other’s expense).  Inside jokes are the best, because it means you’ve got good people in your life.  😉

No one spent a fortune on the gifts or the food.  And while our host and hostess have a beautiful house and backyard, it made me think again about scruffy hospitality.  It really is more about spending time together than making sure everything is perfect before you’re willing to host others.

Around this blog, we love to close our week by celebrating all the ways we found to save money this week.  If you like to save money, you can read through the entire series here.

Now let’s hop to it!

The 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week

5 ways we've saved money this week episode 79

Cleaning

I’m never going to be mistaken for Martha Stewart.  With 5 kids and a busy life, our house is often messy.  I’m ok with a “good enough” clean.

But one thing I notice is the difference it makes to give a room a good deep clean.  I’m talking about the type of clean where you get rid of bags full of stuff you finally realize you’re never going to use.  You rearrange things and the place looks new again.

We’re #pressingon towards a debt free life, and not spending money until we’re there.  Yeah, I could look for “free” ways to upgrade things and do the projects that desperately need to be done around here.  But how often have you looked for a free solution only to discover that the work that goes with it costs far more than you’d anticipated?

All.the.time.

I’m not playing that game right now.  So for this year, it’s less projects, more cleaning/decluttering/rearranging.

Fishing

Fishing is a hobby that can cost about as much as you want it to.  For us, we’re content to pull out the old fishing poles, dig for worms in our back yard, and hit our neighbor’s pond.

It costs nothing and it falls perfectly in line with our slow paced summer.  I love it!

Patience

One of our kids needed a dresser in a bad way.  I’ve been looking at Goodwill every week, hoping to find a good deal.  They only had dressers that were overpriced pressed wood.  No thanks.

Luckily I finally found a good wooden dresser with dovetail drawers.  It was only $30 and it was right in my own town.  Perfect!  Hubby drove right over and loaded it up.

We’ll leave it in the garage for a while, but if it looked or smelled questionable we wouldn’t have brought it home.  Now the 13 year old has a paint job in his future!

Fencing

Not the sport in the Olympics (though that would be cool!).  We needed a new fencing system for the barn.  We were able to make a cheap hog panel work, and even have part of it left over for another barn project.

Use It Up

I’ve been on a mission to use up all the foods in our fridge before they go bad.  I’ve made casseroles and a banana cake this week.  No complaints on the cake!

Those are the 5 ways we saved this week!

I love me a good money story!  So I pulled together all of the stories that have inspired me to think differently…and even get off my duff and act on those thoughts!  Here are the must reads.

Stories about money and the impact they make

Had a thought this week.  When is it worth it to get the extended warranty on an item?