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!
I’m so out of practice of doing these weekly that it’s hard for me to even remember what we did over the past week, since time has seemed to kind of all blend together this whole growing season. Good thing I take pictures every day, which helps to jog my memory a bit!
We’re currently at the tail end of the growing season, which is a time of high excitement over here. It means that once the frost hits sometime in the next few weeks, while our days will still be full to the brim with farm tasks, they tend to FEEL a little slower, mostly just because we don’t have to try and keep up on the constant harvesting anymore (or the constant bouquet-making). We’re not quite there yet, but the excitement is real!!
Hyrum, our third child, also started his second year of preschool this last week. That means that on the mornings he goes to that, we only have Naomi with us, which has allowed Matt and I a little more freedom in what we’re able to do.
Lots of little shifts over here in a lot of different things, most of which have been positive moves towards a more sustainable pace. No complaints over here!
Here are some of the frugal wins I managed to rustle up this last week:
Note: There may be affiliate links to books or products mentioned in this post.
We started up our (free) weekly hikes again
Hiking is frugal for a few reasons. For one, it’s (often) free, and since I love doing it with other people, it also fulfills the need for a social activity but without requiring money (unlike many other social or family bonding activities, such as going out to eat or to an amusement park or zoo or something). Hiking also provides physical exercise (which helps to keep later medical costs lower) as well as provides numerous positive benefits for your mental well-being and stress levels. If we don’t routinely do positive things to keep all that in check, we will surely pay for it later through increased medical, therapy, and drug costs.
Plus I just love it, which is reason enough to keep doing it 🙂
Once fall starts to set in, we try and get out on a short family hike each Sunday until the snow starts coming in. It’s one of our favorite family traditions, and I’m so happy it’s the season for it once again!
I carpooled with a friend to an appointment two hours away
Once a month, I make a four hour round trip to go see my specialized massage therapist, who helps keep my back functional after a severe injury I got years ago. This last trip, I had a friend who wanted to go to the same massage clinic to try it out, so we decided to carpool together. I drove, she covered the gas, and it made the trip WAY more enjoyable to have someone with me to chat with for the length of the drive. All in all, a total frugal (and friendly!) win, and it’s something we plan to repeat again in the future.
While on the same trip, I also completed several deliveries on the way for the flower farm, and we also did a Sam’s Club run on the way back. Not only did combining everything save on gas (which was covered by her, anyway), but because I did farm tasks on the drive, it meant that almost all the miles could be written off on our taxes. Whenever we’re making longer trips like this, that’s something we always try and do since it makes a HUGE impact on our taxes owed come the following year!
We started tagging all the dahlias we want to save for next season
Dahlia tubers can get insanely expensive, so they’re often one of the biggest investments you make plant-wise for the first few years if you’re a flower farmer, and if you live in a climate colder than a Zone 8, you need to dig up your dahlia tubers and store them indoors over the winter in order to save them from year to year. Even though this is a big time commitment, we not only save ourselves the cost of the original dahlia tubers we now don’t need to replace, but each dahlia plant produces MORE tubers over the course of the season, which we can then add to our own stock or sell at a profit.
This season, we planted around 250 dahlia tubers. If each tuber then produces 8 more tubers on average, that’s 2,000 tubers we now have. Since we only plan to plant about 500 next year, that’s 1,500 tubers that we can then sell if we choose. Most tubers sell for at least $8 apiece, so you’re looking at a potential gross sale of $12,000. Now, I already know we won’t keep that many tubers because some of the varieties we tried this year aren’t worth saving (and I highly doubt we’ll have the customer base in the spring to move so many tubers anyway), but even if we’re able to make a few thousand dollars off the tubers, it’s well worth the effort of digging them all up and dividing them (even if it does take several days to accomplish). Even if we were never to sell the tubers, it’s STILL worth the effort of digging them up to save, since we then don’t need to replace those tubers every single year. Win win.
I made an extra credit card payment
The whole point of starting this weekly frugal wins series was to motivate myself to be more frugal so that we could make progress on paying down the credit card debt we accumulated a couple years ago when we replaced half the windows in our home. We’d planned to pay off the credit card before it started accruing interest, but we hadn’t factored in the loss of not just one, but both jobs for my husband and me. Long story short, it’s taken MUCH longer than we ever dreamed to pay it off.
However, we have been able to make progress on it this year, and this month, we put an extra $100 towards paying it off early. Some months we’ve been able to do an extra $400 and some months only an extra $30 or so, but we’ve tried to always put SOMETHING extra on it every month at the very least, which means we’ve reduced it down by about two-thirds of what it was.
When I know that we’ll be making an extra payment when I make up a new month’s budget, I actually go ahead and transfer the extra amount to pay towards it right then so that when the monthly credit card bill is assessed, it’s assessing an overall lower number than if I had waited to lump in the extra money with the minimum payment. For example, if my minimum payment were $40 and I knew I’d be putting $140 towards the total for the month, I wouldn’t wait until the statement came due to put the extra $100 towards the debt — I would just do it immediately so that the amount of interest charged would be slightly less since now the debt would be slightly less.
Not sure if that makes sense, but every little bit counts, especially when it means less money we’re paying towards interest!
I’m taking part in a free 30-day decluttering challenge
I’m a bit of a YouTube junkie, and one type of content I follow a LOT of is minimalism/cleaning/organizing channels. A favorite creator of mine is Cas from Clutterbug, and she’s currently doing a free challenge in September where she puts up a new short video every day (around 6-7 minutes) and walks you through a different area of your house to declutter. You only need to do five minutes of time and get rid of five things every day, and it’s been the perfect way for me to try and get back into a daily decluttering habit during a very busy season.
I am my own biggest roadblock with reaching my minimalism goals because my perfectionist tendencies mean that I even want to declutter in an ideal way (meaning, I want to do a super focused decluttering session of one very specific area that I basically declutter down to its ideal state before moving on). This tendency is only hindering my progress at this point (which I definitely recognize), so I love that this challenge came up at the perfect time.
Other Frugal Wins
- We’ve been eating a lot more from our freezer, including some frozen hamburger patties we got for free from a friend around a year ago (but which we hadn’t touched)
- I shopped the bins of hand-me-downs for shoes for Mathias rather than just hopping online and getting some right away
- I got my free book from my Book of the Month subscription for my birthday month! 🙂
What are your frugal wins for the last week? Are you getting excited for fall?
