This is a series in the style of The Frugal Girl’s Five Frugal Things, where I post weekly about what I’ve done lately to save money and make things stretch in order to further our financial goals, which currently include us paying off a decent hunk of debt. I encourage you to play along and post your own weekly frugal wins in the comments section below!
It’s been a good week around here! Better systems in place this week meant less stress, more time to have fun together, and more efficient work overall. We also enjoyed celebrating Valentine’s Day and having the kids home from school for Presidents Day. The closer we get to spring, the more I feel my energy and creativity renewed day by day, and I’m excited to have several blog posts in the work at the moment!
Here’s some of our frugal wins for this past week:
Note: There may be affiliate links to books, products, or services mentioned in this post.
We celebrated Valentine’s Day on the 15th
If you’ve been around here for awhile, you’ll know that we sometimes have a pretty loose approach to when we celebrate certain holidays. When we were first married, we often did our Christmas together days before the 25th since we were often traveling to see family on the actual holiday, and we’ve now officially made the Sunday before Mother’s Day the day we celebrate Mother’s Day for me, since we’re always super busy with flower farm stuff the week leading up to the actual holiday. For probably the last 8 or 9 years, we’ve also made it a habit to do Valentine’s Day on the 15th, solely for the purpose of being able to take advantage of everything being half off at the store.
It’s always Matt’s duty to pick out V-day presents for everyone, so he just knows his budget and then goes and sees what he can find the day after. We save at least $20-50 a year by doing it this way, and our kids still have a ton of fun with the holiday. This year, we went more simple since I’d already gotten a bigger gift for them all to share (the first two seasons of Bluey on DVD), so they each got a little stuffed animal (their favorite), a fun notebook, and stickers.
We shopped around for landscape fabric
Spring is always a major buying spree for the farm by necessity, but we try to go about it as wisely and frugally as possible. This week, Matt shopped around for landscape fabric and found the kind we needed for nearly half the price on eBay. The seller’s ratings were excellent, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it was a good choice, since it appeared to be the exact kind of fabric we were looking for. As long as it works out, that saved us $400.
We used a gift card to get some ice cream
We got a gift card years ago for the local ice cream shop, but then we somehow misplaced the gift certificate soon after receiving it. Well, in all the decluttering we’ve done, we located it again, and then Matt and I used it to treat ourselves to shakes last night after the kids were in bed 🙂
(Matt especially appreciated his cold treat because he’d spend several hours outside yesterday digging and tilling up new beds for the farm!)
I lowered my stress levels through better time management 🙂
The studies that have been done linking stress with poor health, sleep, mental wellbeing, etc. are numerous, and so when I started to feel majorly stressed out the other week from having taken on another part-time gig in addition to farming right now, I knew I needed to work out a better system, and fast. So I asked Matt to be 100% on kid and house duty last Monday for the whole day so that I could just hammer out everything I needed to do that week for the marketing job. Then, on Tuesday morning, Matt and I sat down together and spent about three hours intensively planning out everything that we each needed to do week by week for the next 6 weeks, or until we’re officially in the start of our flower farming season.
It made the hugest difference in my stress levels, and it also meant we ended up (both) being more productive the rest of the week but without feeling stressed about it because we were both on the same page, knew exactly what was on the priority for that week and what wasn’t, and then when we’d actually completed our lists, we could take breaks as we needed, stress-free.
Seriously, so amazing.
Why is managing stress frugal? Well, if I’m not running at my best due to stress or poor sleep, it literally affects my ability to run our business efficiently, make wise money choices, or have the energy to do frugal things like baking my own bread. In fact, I would argue that effectively managing your stress levels is probably the #1 thing you can do to be frugal, especially because if you don’t, you very well might land yourself in the hospital sooner or later and/or end up having to take a huge break from work/life to get yourself right again, neither of which will be saving you money.
I’ve been using a home teeth whitening kit
Every few years, I like to use Crest WhiteStrips to freshen up the look of my teeth. I don’t go through a whole pack at once, but rather use 5-6 every other year or so. This time, I did need to buy a new pack (and made sure to get the best deal I could find, through a deal Sam’s Club was running), but just doing it myself is obviously far less expensive than going to a professional to do it.
(Note: I don’t think Sam’s Club is currently running the deal anymore on the WhiteStrips, but if you’re wanting to become a Sam’s Club member and want a fabulous price, they’re running an amazing deal for new members right now where you can join for just $20 through the end of the week!)
Other Frugal Wins:
- I made several homemade gluten-free baked goods
- We filled up at a cheaper gas station when we went out to eat about an hour away
- I’m holding off on a brand new flower farming book I want until the price hopefully goes down in a few months
- I signed up for a free trial of Discovery Plus so I could watch reruns of my favorite show (Growing Floret)
- We ran out of some nice-but-not-necessary items (like paper towels), so we’ve just been making do without any since we’ve almost reached the end of our grocery budget this month
- I received my Big Fat Check from Rakuten this week, which mostly all came from grocery shopping I’d done online through Sam’s Club, and then some other bits and bobs from other places, like buying the landscape fabric on eBay this week. Score!
What’s going on in your corner of the world?
