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Back to school time is anything but frugal.  You have to fight tooth and nail to find ways to save money this time of year.  Between school fees, supplies, clothing (and I’m just talking about what’s needed for growing reasons, not fashion!), pictures, and sports playing fees (plus the cost of getting into games), a family could go broke!

At this point, we really need to treat this like another Christmas.  It takes months to save the money needed for Christmas gifts and fun.  We should spend our summer saving up for all of these back to school fees, too.

These are the kinds of things that lead to crazy amounts of credit card debt if you aren’t careful!

The 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week

Different ideas for saving money...like putting the breaks on certain types of spending!

Each Friday we wrap up the week with a recap on the ways we saved.  Every week gets us a little closer to freedom from credit card debt!

If you love to read money saving tips, catch up on the whole series here.

Let’s begin the end of another week!

Just One

I promised our 3 year old that we’d go do something fun on the second day of school.  He gets so bored at home when his siblings head out to school!  So we headed for the zoo.

We didn’t have any easy snacky foods in the house, and I’m totally wiped out from weeks of preparation for school while keeping up with the blog and family.  I did pack a lunch and took one water bottle with us.

About 11:30 I realized that I had never eaten breakfast.  Since I didn’t bring any food into the zoo and I didn’t want my tummy to digest itself, I decided to buy something.  I know, not my best work.

Now it used to be that if I was going to buy one thing, I might as well go all out.  Buying a pretzel?  Why not grab a pricey drink while I’m at it?!

This time I managed to stop at one pretzel.  We shared my breakfast and drank the water bottle I had brought along.  It worked great and I saved a lot of money by using a little self control.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Ideas for saving money by putting on the breaks! #money” quote=”Ideas for saving money by putting on the breaks! ” theme=”style6″]

Eclipse

Did you enjoy the eclipse?  We settled for viewing it from home.  Luckily we had 92% coverage, so it was still an impressive event.  The next one is going to pass even closer to home!  But I have a feeling that people will find ways to make even more money off the next event than they did this time.

The price of eclipse glasses went from $2 or $3 to $20 and even more on the day of the eclipse!  There’s another case where planning ahead helps you save.  We grabbed two free pairs from our local library (and Grammy provided a couple more for us to share!).

Picnic

Lately I’ve been in constant meetings… or a hermit.  I haven’t had a lot of time with family and friends.  So it was really nice to spend time with them!  We had a potluck picnic at a local park.  It was super frugal and a lot of fun.

Water

You can learn about our weird water situation here, but the short story is that we have to have every drop of water that we use trucked in.  We usually make a load last 2 weeks, but this time we managed to stretch it enough to skip a pay period.  That was a nice savings!

Shoelaces

Saving shoes is practically a past time for me!  While clothes take up a lot of space, we only save shoes that are still in good shape.  So there aren’t nearly as many of them to keep.

I somehow managed to not have to buy shoes for anyone at the start of the school year.  That has never happened before, and usually every single child needs a new pair!  The only thing I had to do was find shoelaces for one child, and a friend helped us out with that.

That is a significant savings!!  Which is good, because now we have to pay marching band fees.  (Sheesh!)

Those are the ways we saved this week!

I’m off to make sure all the school forms are filled out and ready to go!  How about you?

Curious about blogging?  Check out the lessons I’ve learned in my second year of blogging!

8 Helpful Things I Learned

How have you saved this week?