Winter feels like the perfect time to hang out in the kitchen. Why not warm yourself up by the oven while you bake yummy foods for your family? As a bonus, you can make more from scratch and spend less money on fast food or convenience foods from the store!
Thanks to my 30 day money challenge, I was inspired to get back in the kitchen again. Lately I’ve made white chicken chili, homemade lemon meringue pie (even the pie crust was from scratch!), Chex Mix, hot chocolate mix, and several batches of cookies.
And now I’m working on a resource that will help you make more from scratch, too! Keep an eye out for that in the next two weeks.
Every Friday, we hold ourselves accountable to our money goals by sharing the ways we saved money that week. You can read through the entire series here.
The 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week
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New Purse
My purse broke a few months ago. Luckily, I found an old one in the closet and just switched to that. Then, a week ago, it decided to break, too. 🙁
Luckily, I got a gift card for Christmas! So I headed to the mall and found a replacement. It’s kind of pretty, and it will definitely hold me over until we’re out of debt.
Cheap Haircuts
Yes, I do cut hair at home. (These are my favorite pair of clippers…they pay for themselves in no time!) But when my oldest boys hit middle school, buzz cuts stopped being acceptable. Don’t ask me, I’m no fashionista.
So I’ve started sending them out for haircuts. Since Great Clips opened a new shop in our hometown, they are running big sales for the next month. So that’s saving us a ton of money! They’re really happy with the cuts they’ve gotten there. So if we can keep the same stylist, I think we’ll have a winner. And it’s close to home!
Water Filters
Read all about our weird water situation here, but suffice it to say that we go through a lot of water filters. I was able to buy a big pack of them for super cheap on Amazon this week. I also found them on Ebay for a good price.
DIY Repair
When we changed the filter in the fridge, we found a problem. Hubby was able to search Youtube to figure out how to fix it. He managed the repair in about 10 minutes. And the more of these types of repairs he does, the better he gets at it!
Blog Stuff
This week I renewed a tool I’ve been using to get more Google searches to my blog. I had cash ready to cover the costs!
A year ago I took the Sticky SEO course, and it made a huge difference in my blog traffic! My Google traffic grew like crazy. (I also changed my blog to https in September, which Siteground was happy to help me with. That boosted my traffic even more!) See the numbers here:
I’ve taken a LOT of blogging courses, and two of them made the biggest difference for me in 2017. One was Sticky SEO (which just closed, but you can get on the waiting list for the next session).
The other is a more affordable ebook, but it’s not about SEO. It’s called Pinteresting Strategies, and it’s a smart system for growing your Pinterest traffic.
I credit those two courses for helping me reach a much bigger audience this year! They are both excellent resources, and I wish I had found them sooner. But I’m happy to have that knowledge now!
Those are the 5 ways we saved (or made!) money this week.
Don’t forget to get your copy of the book! You can spend a cold night cuddled on the couch, learning how to save money.
How did you save money this week?
I'm Jamie, and I want to help you afford a beautiful life with your family. 
1. Friends of us had extra tickets & invited all of us to the hockey game. We saved over $80 on the tickets, plus we also took my daughter’s friend & my father in law too. FIL paid for the parking, so no expense to us.
2. Used a coupon on MLK Jr Day on a shirt I bought for my daughter’s orchestra concert.
3. Cut cable out today. Will save $569/9 months.
4. Shopped my fridge, freezer & pantry first before making grocery list for this weekend’s camp getaway.
5. Ate leftovers for all my workday lunches
Nice work, Jamie!! My husband has also learned a TON from watching YouTube videos! it’s amazing what’s out there!
Great week of savings Jamie. We were just thanking God (really) for Youtube yesterday. It has helped us solve a lot of problems in this household!
Boy is that true for us, too!
We have a well and hubby installed a string filter followed by a charcoal filter, both in big blue filter houses. The first gets any sediment while the charcoal really fine cleans the water. We have the+same setup in our vacation rental unit that is on community water and there is alot more crud in the pipes there.
Pruning fruit trees and berry bushes this time of year. Got a great yield on blueberries last summer and want the bushes kept in good shape to produce.
Hubby is still the family barber/stylist. Thankfully the children despite hitting their teen years like his work, the younger is very picky and hubby does as he asks with the different attachment sizes and then he finishes up with the scissors over comb technique to give a polished look. He is good with the shears, he has been cutting mine for years which saves me hundreds a year aside from the boys and he is looking into YouTube videos to diy the sharpening of the convex blades on the expensive hair shears. One place wanted $30 to sharpen them, yikes! So he is planning on buying a leather polishing wheel for the grinder to keep the edges sharp. He said the edges would be ruined using a regular sharpening stone. He is picky, says the cheapie hair shears just don’t cut as well. I believe him and he gets a lot of use on his shears between mine, my children’s, my mom’s and a couple other girl friends of mine that stop by for haircuts. He will use it to sharpen the kitchen knives as well, so multiple uses for it. And it is cheaper than one trip to the salon would cost me. Of course I wouldn’t want to go, when I get my hair done as I want by hubby who would never get scissor happy on me like the salon always did.
That’s awesome! It would be so handy if my Hubby had those skills, too. I’m not patient enough to get good at cutting hair.