Did you happen to notice that this is week number 40 in the 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week series?? I’m so excited to have reached another milestone!
I wasn’t sure how long I would be able to keep up with this series when I first began writing it. Each week I find it a challenge to come up with another 5 ways we’ve saved without being too repetitive. But the challenge is good for me, especially in our #yearofno.
As always, you can catch up with the entire series here if you’d like to. Otherwise, let’s celebrate another Frugal Friday with a brand new:
5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week
Discounts! One of the yearly goals that we didn’t nix in favor of paying off debt this year was to get the kids swimming. It’s so important for them to know how to swim, and something I’ve dabbled in over the years.
Since we don’t have access to a pool anywhere, they’ve not had enough opportunity to learn how to swim. So we decided to join the YMCA. It’s the most cost effective method for getting all 5 kids in the pool regularly.
But we weren’t just going to sign up and pay all the joining fee and regular monthly costs. Of course I looked for discounts! And I was able to find them. We were able to get the joining fee waived and got a better price for joining with a friend.
These kids should be swimmers by the time school starts again!
Online Grocery Shopping I decided to take the plunge and give online grocery shopping a try. This is a service my local grocery store just started offering, so I was curious to see how it worked. I’m not sure if it saved me money over going into the store, because I often find hidden deals or substitutions to my meal plan while I shop.
But since I have had no time at all for grocery shopping lately, it certainly saved money over the convenience foods I would have purchased instead. So I’m calling it a money saver!
Look for a full review on my experience next week.
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Vacation Bible School Our kids spent this week enjoying good company and good lessons at our church’s Vacation Bible School. Many area churches offer their VBS to anyone who wants to sign up. If you find that the sign up price is too high, look around for another local church. Most of the churches in my area offer it for free or nearly free.
Loosened my Food Standards Get ready for a little controversy…
I’m not the type of Mom who has to buy organic everything, but I do have certain standards that I try to live by. I prefer to buy cereal that isn’t made exclusively from sugar.
However, there are weeks when the absolute only cereal on sale at my price point (I prefer to buy it when it’s under 15 cents per ounce) is that crappy sugar laden cereal.
Sometimes I just find other breakfast foods to substitute rather than our beloved cereal. But sometimes life is chaos, and we end up eating bowls of sugary cereal.
Am I compromising my kids’ health? I don’t think so. We don’t eat a steady diet of sugar all day long, and I prefer everything in moderation rather than stressing out over having the perfect balance in our diet.
Once we are debt free, I’ll go back to springing for foods that cost a little more but are better for us. In the meantime, we are going to be ok.
DIY We had a nasty storm come through our neighborhood, and we lost most of one of our trees. Happily, it didn’t hit our house or anything important! And we are happy to have the firewood, although I’m sad that we lost our tire swing tree.
We put the kids to work cleaning up the mess and will cut up the tree ourselves using borrowed equipment from my Dad. It’s going to be a lot of work, but much, much cheaper than hiring that work out.
That’s 5 more ways that we’ve saved money this week!
Little by little, we’re adding together enough money saving ways to dig us out of debt.
Did you catch my post earlier this week? I’ve got 14 ways to keep yourself motivated when you’re on a long journey to pay off debt. Read about it here.
How did you save money this week?
How great that you could find a good deal on the Y! We really enjoyed being members and I’m happy that my daughter can swim. It was tough to let our membership go, but we were only using it for summers and our city pools are good.
VBS is generally a good cheap activity for the kids. Since so many of the kids at our church go to year round schools, we do ours over the course of a weekend. It’s a little strange, but at least my kid gets to go. I’ve heard that there are other churches do theirs in the evening to accommodate year-round schools, but I know neither of those approaches is the norm.
Can’t wait to hear about online grocery shopping. I, too, am curious if that can be as cost-effective as going yourself and manually looking for deals.
my friends with kids LOVE the online shopping option for the store. It saves them from impulse buys, lots of “can I haves” and very little ones just putting things in the cart.
Our grocery store charges a $5 fee per trip or $99 per year. I know a lot of working outside the home moms who use it exclusively as a time saver to be able to spend more time with the kids.
I don’t use it because I love grocery shopping – for some reason it relaxes me. But the few times I’ve used it (no time or big needs for a party), it’s been wonderful!
I think the expense is probably evened out by impulse buys that are eliminated. We’re in a #yearofno situation too so I don’t use it currently but once we have our debt paid off, I can easily see me doing it again!
I need online grocery shopping this week…wish they had it closer to us so I could take advantage. Really it beats going into the party store to buy the little things.
sorry about the loss of your tree and I’m glad it missed the house.
have a great week.
Awesome 5 ways that you’ve saved this week! I’m on vacation this weekend but I’ve still found ways to save. We’re on the way to the grocery store now so we don’t have to eat out for the rest of the day.
That’s great when you can even save while you’re vacationing! Hope you have a great trip.
I totally get you on the loosened food standards. We are in the same boat, and once debt free, will contribute a little more to better food choices! 🙂
I was so shocked to discover recently that most VBS charge nowadays – growing up, it was always free! It makes sense that there would need to be a small charge, but it still surprised me to see the difference. So glad you joined us again at #FridayFrivolity!
I was surprised to hear it, too. It’s definitely worth paying attention to the price so you aren’t surprised by it at the last minute.
This post has great ideas of how to look to for discounts in all our things we do daily. Thank you!
I love this series and I hope that you are able to keep doing a version of it, I find so many great ideas that get me thinking about our budget and where we can cuts costs. My ideas may not be the same as yours, but you push me to think of a solution. I call that a win!
Excellent! That’s what I hope to do. No two families will be alike, but hopefully I can still challenge you to think a little differently about your own spending. 🙂 Thanks for reading!