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After a hectic May and early June, I’ve been on a mission to reclaim my home.  It’s hard to keep up with the daily mess when you’re so busy!

Every time I try to clean and organize, I start to feel frustrated by my house.  It’s a 1950s built home, and let’s just say that closet space wasn’t a priority for people in those days.  My vacuum cleaner doesn’t really have an “in its place” place.  Same for several other essential things.

Yeah, I let myself have a minor pity party about that for a while.  Then I decided to take action.  For starters, I went into my disastrous attic and emptied the entire thing.  Then I sorted through everything and put things back in an orderly fashion.  That gave me a bit of attic space to use as a closet.

I also took 7 trash bags of stuff (as well as several big items) to the Goodwill.  I sent another 7 bags to the trash.  I got rid of several baby items.  (Which is kinda sad, but even if we do have another baby I won’t be using that pack and play anymore.  It’s worn out!)

And you know what?  The house feels a little more livable.  I’d be lying if I said building a closest isn’t on my short list for once we’re free from credit card debt, though!

The 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week

Yelp!

Hubby is a fan of the Yelp app, and he especially uses it when we travel.  In fact, he used it so often that one of the main insults from the kids in the back of the van was “If you don’t stop it, I’m leaving you a bad Yelp review!”

It paid off, though, when a small restaurant offered us free fries for using the app!  The fries came with gravy and a cheese sauce, which I wasn’t brave enough to try.  But, hey, free food!

Keeping Up With Laundry

I’m pretty sure I need a badge for this one!  With all that cleaning, keeping up with laundry is a must.  A family of 7 makes a tremendous pile of dirty clothes in a short amount of time.

But beyond keeping up with the daily laundry, I’ve been intentional about keeping the wash/dry/sort cycle flowing.  How often do you rewash clothes you forgot in the washer?  When life gets crazy, it happens more than we like to think.  All that rewashing does a number on our water and electric bills.  (Especially when your water bill is already high like ours!)

Skipped the Drive In

We’ve got a local drive in movie theater.  It’s actually only a few miles from our home!  We’re lucky, since those are hard to find these days.

And I love the idea of supporting the drive in and sometimes worry that they’ll go out of business.  When they show a double feature that the kids would love, and carload night means we could take the whole family at a reasonable price…that’s hard to resist.

But I’ve been resisting anyway!  The biggest savings I get is when I #presson and avoid spending.

Skipped Pizza

The boys had some friends over, and sometimes I’ll treat them to pizza.  I’ve learned that kids don’t always like my homemade pizza, so I quit serving that.  I’ll either pick up some frozen pizzas or (occasionally) I’ll splurge on ordered pizza.

This time I wasn’t prepared with any pizza, and for a minute I considered ordering some.  Then I realized that we had plenty of meat for the grill, so we did that instead.  I was proud of myself, and it helped me reset our “no frivolous spending” mindset.  Just what I needed to carry us through the coming months!

Nickels and Dimes

Another great habit we were beginning to lose was the idea of nickel and diming our debt to death. We were very good about doing this for a long time, but (again) the chaos lately has made it hard.

This month I’ve been able to make many small payments to k/o our latest credit card victim (that’s on top of the large payments I make with each paycheck).

Will we beat the clock on debt payoff?  Time will tell, but right now I’m anxious to win this race by a mile!

Those are the 5 ways we saved money this week!

Now I’m off to empty out another room and see what I can do about this storage situation.

Before you go, check out my Hertz review and see how we saved on our van rental (plus learn why we think it’s a great idea to rent a van for a long trip!).

How did you save money this week?