Saving Money

What are you doing these days to cut costs?

I do haircuts for husband and 2 yo. It may not cost a lot for their haircuts, but over the years it sure does add up.

Also, I’ve started to make my own bread. I have a recipe from my husband’s Grandma to make in my bread machine. That bread is special to my husband because of the memories it invokes. It’s a great recipe and very tasty bread. But my husband would rather I not make that for every day use but for special occasion meals. In my recent bread-making experiments, I’ve discovered that buying frozen loaves to let rise and bake on my own are essentially the same price as the ingredients to make my own bread from scratch. (I was really hopeful with a bread-from-scratch recipe. But I’m frustrated with this whole “high altitude” thing; it won every time because my bread just wouldn’t rise, or it would flop over.) So, frozen loaves it is! They’re a lot less frustration and cheaper than buying bread from the store.

We do other homemade stuff. Making cookies with the kids is a blast! Not only do we end up with a tasty treat in the end, but the kids are learning to take turns/share through the process, and they’re learning cleanliness (like not licking fingers/hands and then diving into the dough). Homemade pizza is another meal that saves money, compared to frozen pizza prices up here and eating out at pizza places.

Recently, we discovered weak spots in our budget – categories where we’d tend to go overboard. For those 3 categories, we decided to pull out the month’s allotment in cash and go with the envelope system. (We use debit cards for the others.) That has helped a lot for the past month we've been doing this.

We’ve also tried to cut down on our trips to the valley in attempts to preserve our car budget.

The last time we went down for our monthly shopping trip, we began to write down prices of frequent purchases to compare (1) the grocery store up here in town, (2) Wal-Mart, and (3) Sam’s Club. We only priced one of the stores, but hopefully this next month we can do scouting trips to the other places and figure out which is the better buy.

Always eager for more money-saving tips!