Frugality, Weekly Frugal Wins

Weekly Frugal Wins // Diet Changes + Fall Baking

This is a series in the style of The Frugal Girl’s Five Frugal Things, where I post 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!

Uh…so a month has gone by, and I haven’t posted.

Whoops.

I know I sound like a broken record, but…the flower farm is kicking my butt this season. You’d think that now that we’ve officially been hit with a hard frost and are no longer offering any more cut flowers for this season, life would have slowed down, but that just isn’t the case. We’ve now got bulbs to plant (and sell), dried flower markets to set up, compost and peony orders to fulfill…plus the usual craziness that is this time of year with its Halloween parties, social events, school items, etc. etc.

You guys get it.

However, I’ve sorely missed blogging and I seem to finally be getting sick with whatever junk has been floating through the rest of the members of my household, so I’m taking some time today to write this up rather than clean the house or pack more orders.

Now that we’re going into the “leaner” part of our year since our growing season is over, it’s more important than ever for me to make consciously frugal choices more often than not. Here are a few of the things I’ve been doing lately to save money:

Note: There may be affiliate links to books or products mentioned in this post.

I got rewards for exercising from my insurance company

Our medical insurance company has offered rewards for years for tracking your exercise and submitting it, but because we didn’t have a gym membership or a wearable fitness tracker, there didn’t really seem to be an easy way for me to take advantage of it. However, this fall I’m auditing my friend’s Zumba class through the local college for free (I’m trading out teaching some routines), so it was an easy option for me to submit to the insurance.

I’ve already earned $60 in gift certificates and plan to earn $40 more by the time the class is finished in December.

My insurance also offers cash incentives to schedule an annual physical, which I got taken care of last month. Yay for easy money!

I bought chicken at a deep discount

For the past couple Christmases, I’ve made homemade chicken broth to give out as neighbor gifts. It’s a pretty frugal gift option anyway since the chicken pieces I use (chicken liver and gizzard/parts) are cheap year-round, but this last week, I noticed that they were marked down on clearance at our local Walmart, so I just bought as much as I would use for the broth and froze it that same day. When I calculated out the cost of the broth a couple years ago, it cost me $1.79 per quart to make each gift, but since the meat is the most expensive part, my total cost for making each jar will probably be right around just $1 apiece. Frugal AND tasty!!

I went off dairy and sugar for about 6 weeks

I have been in a flare-up of my autoimmune disease since Naomi was born more than 18 months ago, and since I exclusively control my disease through diet (and not through any kind of medication), I knew I needed to make more tweaks in order to finally kick it back into remission for good. Usually it’s enough for me to just go off gluten, but this time I cut out dairy and sugar too for about a month and a half (and I also was very meticulous with making sure I didn’t even have the slightest bit of cross contamination with gluten, which I usually don’t have to be so careful about, as long as I don’t directly ingest a product that actually has it in it). While it’s still not quite in remission yet, we do seem to be officially on the out with it, which I could not be more happy about.

As a bonus for going off dairy and sugar, I also dropped a few pounds and my cholesterol levels actually went down quite a bit, too. I’ll take it!

Anyway, this is frugal for multiple reasons. First, anything we can do to promote better health will net us HUGE savings in the long run; second, I’m usually a heavy dairy eater especially, so the amount we’ve needed to spend on food (particularly cheese) has gone down about $25 a month; and third, I’m saving the cost of medication by choosing to fix the issue through diet rather than through prescriptions.

We got most of our Halloween pumpkins for free

Our town is really good at offering a ton of free stuff for families, and a new one this year that I noticed was that our local volunteer first responder department was offering two free pumpkins per household. I’m not always super good at remembering to actually take advantage of stuff like this, but I made sure to put a reminder in my phone, and then I sent Matt to pick them up right near the beginning so he could have a wide selection. Additionally, two of our kids attended local pumpkin patches for their school’s respective field trips, and they each got to choose a free pumpkin to bring home. That meant we only needed to purchase one pumpkin to carve for Halloween!

Our car mechanic agreed to come to our house to do a repair (saving us the cost of a tow)

The new (to us) truck we acquired for the flower farm a few months ago has a weird thing going on with the steering mechanism/ignition that won’t allow us to turn it on, so we’ve been a bit stymied on how to fix it, esp. since multiple mechanics aren’t quite sure why it’s having that issue. Our usual mechanic thought he might be able to tow it to his shop for us, but since the steering wheel was locked up, that wasn’t an option unless we called a tow company. To save us the cost of towing, he actually agreed to come fix it at our house since we’re only a couple blocks away from his shop. That’s the beauty of small town living, folks!

Other Frugal Wins:

  • I made gluten-free muffins (multiple times), cookies, and bread from scratch
  • We pulled out winter clothes in the next size up from the hand-me-down bins in our basement
  • I got my son four pairs of pants at 50% off + utilized rewards at Old Navy, which meant each pair was around 60% off
  • I printed off some free goal tracking charts to keep myself motivated on some farm goals we have
  • We dug up all the dahlia tubers we want to save over the winter so we could multiply our stock and not have to repurchase them in the spring
  • We used up at least some of the apples growing on our trees in an apple crisp, in baked oatmeal, and just eating them fresh (okay, so this is mostly a major frugal fail since hundreds of them went to waste…but at least it wasn’t all of them!)
  • I needed to replace my favorite sneakers, and I was ecstatic to find that they were marked down 33% on Amazon (and still are, last time I checked!). I’m seriously tempted to order an extra pair just to have on hand.

All right, let’s catch up!! Drop a comment below and tell me what you’ve been up to lately!

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