5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week #166

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Happy New Year!

After a lot of chaos over the past couple of years, I’m ready to have a simpler year.

This week I shared my goals for 2023, so check those out and help keep me accountable. 😉

I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and what I could do to best serve people through it.

This 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week series has been popular for a long time (as you can see by this being the 166th post!), and I think I know why.

When I read blogs myself, I find the most useful ones are when people just share the normal things they do in every day life. So I hope to focus more on sharing the things we are doing in real life.

With all that said, here’s the first 5 ways post of the new year.

5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week

Reviewed Subscriptions

Those Amazon and Chewy type subscriptions are handy, aren’t they?

Without thinking about it, the things you need come every month automatically.

And the price of these things have become reasonable, so for us, it has been worth it to set them up.

But that doesn’t mean the price stays “worth it”. It needs to be checked occasionally.

So I spent this week looking over subscriptions and canceling some of them.

Dishwasher Soap

For a long time, I’ve been using dishwasher soap tabs because they cleaned my dishes better.

Before, I would have to rewash dishes a few times to get them clean, so the math worked out that the higher priced soap was saving money in the long run.

We got a new washer last year, and I finally got smart enough to try the cheaper dishwasher liquid soap in it, just out of curiosity to see if it would clean well.

What do you know? The grinder style dishwashers are so much better at cleaning that the cheaper soap works just fine.

That will save us a lot of money in a house of eight people.

Fruit Bushes

One of my biggest goals this year is to get back to small scale homesteading.

So this week I ordered some strawberry plants and another blueberry plant. They’ll show up at my door at planting time.

I ordered raspberries several years ago, and the plants have thrived, even through some serious neglect on my part. So I have high hopes for these plants!

Also, I’m considering what other perennial plants I can add to our garden to keep us fed.

Leftovers

Twice this week we made huge pots of soup. And in addition to all the Christmas festivities, we also have 2 late December birthdays in our home.

This house is packed with food.

So this week became an experiment on how long you can force your family to eat leftovers before they revolt.

They actually lasted longer than I expected! So I rewarded them with this crockpot chicken alfredo recipe last night. haha

(It was really good, and yes we just threw the raw noodles in and it cooked just fine. Also I used whole milk instead of heavy cream with no issues.)

Organized the House

No matter how many times I declutter my house, I can always take another 10 garbage bags worth of stuff out of here.

It’s crazy how much clutter we accumulate.

But I think the worst thing is when I feel like I have to save something we can’t use anymore “just in case”.

Because, as I am finding out, most of those “just in case” things get piled on top of perfectly usable things. And then we have no idea that we own perfectly usable things, and we end up buying more.

It’s a terrible cycle!

So I’m doing a major cleanout, bigger than I have ever done before. I’m finding that we have multiple copies of tools, bed sheets, gloves, etc.

It’s been a strange lesson. I always thought saving the old coffee pot “just in case” our Keurig breaks was a way to save money later. But it turns out that it’s actually costing me more.

Plus, some of those duplicates (like tools) can go to our adult son so he has some of what he needs after college.

Those are the 5 ways we saved this week!

Hope you have a fun and frugal year!

If saving money is one of your resolutions (or just something you are worried about in this bad economy), make sure you check out my super affordable grocery course.

I’ll show you step by step exactly how our medium sized family of 8 affords to eat on one salary, and it works on any diet in any part of the country.