I’ve been busy working to bring you my best tips on Ways to Find Money for Christmas Presents (and you’ll definitely want to check out that series for some unusual tips!), but I didn’t want to forget about the ever popular 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week series, either.
So here are our 5 ways for this week.
It’s Friday! Ready to get your 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week fix?
Confession time…we’ve had a rather expensive week. Our 10 year old son had a terrible migraine that required 2 hospital trips and an additional stint in the emergency department. That’s not going to be cheap. I also wound up spending money on food and drinks since I didn’t have time to plan ahead (we wanted to get there and relieve his migraine ASAP).
Today we are continuing the Friday series called 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week. You can find all the previous posts in this series right here. There are also some great tips in the comments, so be sure to check those out, too!
Here are the ways we saved money this week.
This week we are continuing our Friday series called 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week. If you missed any posts, you can find them here!
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So without further ado, here are the different ways we have saved this week.
Every Friday, I like to post about ways we have saved money this week. I try to share ideas that go beyond skipping Starbucks daily. (You can go ahead and assume I made my own coffee at home every day!) When you are raising 5 kids on one income, you have to look for deeper ways to be frugal.
Here are the ways we have saved money this week.
When you are feeding and raising a Medium Sized Family, you really have to be aware of waste and spending. I mean, we aren’t Washington D.C.! Here in the real world, we have finite resources to use.
With that in mind, here are 5 ways we’ve saved money this week.
Sometimes we let the kids buy their lunch as a treat, but I generally feel like they can pack a good, healthy lunch for less than $2.50 per child. Each child chooses a fruit or veggie, a dairy (yogurt or cheese), a main course (sandwiches, muffins, wraps, etc.), and they are allowed one junk food item (sometimes). My hubby also packs leftovers to take to work rather than buying an expensive meal at the cafeteria.
Here are my best tips for packing lunches that make it more doable on a tight schedule.
Let me preface this by saying that I hate cutting hair!! I always feel like I’m doing it wrong. It’s tough when your boys have stick straight blonde hair!
I often joke that when we win the lottery, the first thing I will do is start paying for haircuts. (Yeah right, at $60 per month I would probably still not want to waste that kind of money!)
All that said, we bought a set of clippers and recouped the money with the first round of haircuts. No one has complained of my “skills” yet, and it really doesn’t take much time to do each month.
I was able to get seed packets of lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and some other fall growers for just 2 cents each. (Like us on Facebook if you’d like to learn about deals like this!) This fall we will have yummy salads without risk of recalls (that seems to happen a lot with store bought lettuce, doesn’t it?) and for the price of just pennies.
There were a lot of errands to run around here lately. I made sure to plan ahead so that we weren’t constantly buying food and drinks while we were out and about. Sticking with my plan to try to be less comfortable all the time!
I also have been making more effort to make breakfasts ahead of time. We have been stuck in a cereal rut for a long time, and I am finally at a place to make this more of a priority. This week we had Scrappy Baked Oatmeal, which is a great way to use up older pieces of fruit.
My hubby has been fixing up a lot of things around the house. This has saved us hundreds of dollars that we would have paid a handy man! When he is tackling a project, he often looks up YouTube videos to learn how to do it.
He also asks advice from people who have already done similar projects. We can sometimes make repairs using scraps of wood and things we had previously purchased, which saves us even more. I love the fact that he will attack a problem around here, even if he hasn’t done anything like it before!
Click here to see more ways we’ve saved money this week.
How did you do this week?
I'm Jamie, and I want to help you afford a beautiful life with your family. Learn more. 
