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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

5 Ways We've Saved Money This Week 40 Looking for money saving tips? Here are the latest ways to save money that our family is using to dig out of debt.

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.

[Tweet “Get 5 more money saving tips here! #frugal #moneysaver”]

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 to get out of debt: 14 ways to stay motivated

How did you save money this week?