Cut Costs, Save Money
Simple Ways to Stretch Your Budget
With energy prices climbing, housing prices nearly out of reach, and even the cost of food rising as the industry is rocked by one recall after another, more and more people are realizing that every penny counts. But, many people don’t really know how to cut their costs or save money. It seems impossible. How can you save money when everything costs so much more than it did just a few months ago? I wondered the same thing, until the day when my car announced its impending demise, by suddenly being unable to accelerate past 50mph, in a city where you do 65 in the slow lane. A new car simply could not wait six months for me to keep saving towards a meager down payment. I had to find the money, and I had, by the most hopeful estimate, only two weeks in which to do it. And my first child’s first Christmas came during those two weeks, as well. But, I did it, and at risk of sounding like an infomercial, so can you. Here’s just three simple changes I made to cut costs and save money.
Change the way you clean.
First, stop buying laundry detergent. I’m not saying to go around wearing smelly, dirty clothes, though. Make your own! I use a simple recipe. It makes 60 loads of detergent in 20 minutes of my life. The average family of four does 8 loads of laundry a week, so it lasts about 7 weeks. There is an initial investment of 1 container that holds 16 cups of detergent, and one quarter-cup measuring scoop. You can use anything. I favor a container with a flip-top lid, so the lid doesn’t get lost. You can use the scoop that came with your last box of powdered detergent, or you can buy a measuring cup at the local Walmart, or whatever, for around a dollar. The recipe is simple: 6 cups borax, 8 cups baking soda or washing soda, and 1 5-6oz bar of soap. I use Zote soap I bought in Mexico, but most people prefer Felz-Naptha laundry soap, found in the detergent aisle. You can use a regular bath bar, too, if you prefer. Grate the bar of soap. If your bar is soft, freeze it first. You can use an electric cheese grater to do the job, and save even more effort. Dump it into any bucket or plastic wash basin you’ve got. Add the borax and soda, and stir. Pour into your 16-cup storage container. Add one quarter cup of your new detergent to each load of laundry.
What’s your cost savings so far? I pay $4 for a large box of borax, that makes 3 recipes of detergent. I pay $3 for a large box of baking soda, that makes 2 recipes. And I bought a year’s supply of bar soap in Mexico for $1.69, but bars here sell for $1.79 each, so we’ll work with that figure. So, for each recipe, I spend $1.34 on borax, $2 on baking soda, and $1.79 on bar soap, for a grand total of $5.13. That’s 60 loads, which comes to $0.0855 per load. The cheapest powdered detergent on the market in my area is 11 cents a load, but the detergent I used to use was 17 cents a load. Like many families, I do about 7 loads of laundry a week, so I save 9 cents a day by using my detergent. That’s 63 cents every week, that I get to keep. And, I’m doing a good thing for the environment, by running fewer chemicals into my local water supply.
Second, stop buying fabric softener. Don’t replace it with anything. Baking soda is a phenomenally good fabric and water softener. You won’t miss your softener, and it’ll save your dryer from the chemicals in dryer sheets. I was buying dryer sheets, at a cost of about 4 cents a sheet. This raises my laundry savings to 13 cents a day, 91 cents a week, and once again, I’ve reduced the amount of chemicals I use, so I also feel good about the world I’m leaving to my children.
Third, stop running your dryer. Hang your clothes to dry, as much as possible. Don’t have a clothes line? Neither do I. I still run towels, sheets, and socks and underwear in the dryer, but now I only dry 2 loads a week instead of 7 or more. I hang clothes on hangers, and space them out on the shower rods as soon as all the morning showers are done, and they’re dry by bedtime. In some climates, they might take longer to dry. You might want to invest in a clothes line. Project Laundry List (www.laundrylist.org) links to a supplier that sells some really neat, innovative lines for homes that, for whatever reason, cannot have an old-fashioned clothes line in the back yard. How much will this save? If you can hang clothes like me, you have no start-up cost. If you need to spend $200 on a clothes line, you’re going to take more time to see savings. But, my electric clothes dryer costs 34 cents a day. So, five days out of seven, that’s 34 cents I’m not saving. And that, my friend, is $2.61 a week, in laundry savings alone.
Yeah, that figure still sounds pathetically low. But let’s see how this one grabs you. By the following Christmas, my laundry cutbacks left me with $135.72 more to spend on gifts. Starting to sound a little better, in exchange for spending 20 minutes every 6 or 7 weeks? Great, let’s go on to the second small change.
Spend more money.
Spend more money on your food. It’ll save you money, honest. We all know that you can cut costs by stocking up when things are on sale, but be sure you actually DO this, and have a plan to use the food you buy. My system is simple. By paying attention and jotting down some of the most exciting food sales, I have noticed that most sales come around every 4-6 weeks. I usually maintain enough stock to get through 10-12 weeks, in case something happens and I can’t afford to stock up during the next sale. During the Fourth of July sales, mustard was on sale, a dollar a bottle. With a 50-cents-off coupon I got out of the newspaper, that my store doubled, I got a bottle of mustard for free. This is great since my kids love mustard, but mustard has a very long shelf life, and I haven’t seen a price like that in a while, so I picked up not one, but five bottles. Yes, five. The other four are way back in the pantry, and on the inside of the pantry door is a note that I stuck four bottles way back there. When we run out, I’ll check the list before I needlessly buy another bottle. And so it goes for other things. When my Albertson’s had a 10-for-$10 sale on select General Mills cereals, I stocked up. To make the cereal last, I used clear mailing tape to seal the top and bottom of each box. I wrote the expiration date on the box in marker, so it’s easier to read, and I even cut off the Box Tops for Education to donate to our local school, so I wouldn’t forget later. I used coupons provided right by the cereal itself, giving me a dollar off each pair of boxes. This reduced the price to 10 boxes for $5. I bought 60 boxes of cereal, enough to last my children a full year, for $30. The cereal I used to buy cost $180, so I broke the budget the week of the sale, but saved $150 the rest of the year, on cereal alone. And there are more deals to be had than just that. Pinching Your Pennies (www.pinchingyourpennies.com), a group of ladies dedicated to making each penny count, can help you continue to find each good deal that you need to stock up on. Coupons are a big part of their plan, and it can help, but I save plenty without them, just by minding sales and knowing when I need to stock up.
Spend more money on kitchen gadgets. These investments add up. Buy a salsa maker, the kind with the mixing paddle. Use it instead of your big electric mixer, for things like cake mix or corn bread. Use it instead of your food processor for chopping salsa, but also any other vegetable or fruit you need chopped. Drop in a pound of sad-looking strawberries that got lost in the back of the fridge, spin the handle a few times, and heat the resulting berry mush, and you have fresh homemade strawberry syrup, no sugar added. Chop up those few apples that are fixing to go bad, let them heat on low for half an hour while you’re fixing dinner, and refrigerate your homemade applesauce for a late-night snack. You’ll save a few negligible pennies on electricity by using your salsa maker, but you’ll also save big on canned salsa, pre-chopped foods, and foods that, without your salsa maker, you would have had to throw away. But don’t stop there. Buy a food dehydrator. Anytime things start looking a little sad and wilted in your fridge, toss it into the dehydrator. Save banana chips, apple slices, nectarine wedges, dried blueberries, and make your own raisins out of the grapes you aren’t going to finish in time. Preserve slices of carrot and potato for stews. Even dehydrate meat, and store it in the freezer, for stews. The meat and vegetables are self-marinating, as they soak up your broth while re-hydrating, cutting all but the last hour off of your cooking time, and you don’t even need to do anything during that time. Now, homemade stew is easy to make, even on a school night.
Spend more time.
Spend more time stalking sales at the local dollar stores. Collect up items that you sense might make good gifts, or good gift components. I bought a dozen vases one day at a dollar store, two for a dollar, with no real idea about them except that flowers make good gifts. Not long after, when a relative was hospitalized for depression after the recent death of her husband, I took one of those vases to a grocery store where I picked up a $5 bouquet, and put together a vase of flowers that, at the very store I bought my bouquet from, was selling for $22 with the vase included. I saved $16.50. The rest of the vases are slated for Mother’s Day, when I send gifts for my mother and stepmother, my husband’s mother and stepmother, and my two children’s birthmothers. At an average savings of $15 for having taken the time to cut and arrange my own flowers, that saves me $90 on Mother’s Day alone!! You may not spend so much on the mothers in your life, but if I can save this money on Mother’s Day, you can save it on any other gift-giving occasion in your life.
Spend more time on your food. We all know that prepared food is expensive. But who has time to prepare it ourselves? We all have jobs, housework, kids, and our own religious or social obligations. But, if you have a freezer, even a small one, you can spend more time on food preparation, and save big. Around here, our favourite vegetables are steamed broccoli and carrots. So when each came into season, and each one was selling for a mere quarter a pound, I stocked up. Broccoli was a lot more expensive, because I cut off all the florets and froze them, and threw away most of the stems, but even still, for $2 spent on broccoli, I came away with 4 bags of florets. Four similarly-sized bags from the grocery store cost me a dollar each. Carrots worked better, with a lot less waste. To make four bags of carrot slices, I only had to spend 50 cents on carrots. It took me 15 minutes to do all this work, besides the shopping time, and saved me a total of $5.50 for just the 8 bags I made to last one week. I could have made more, but there’s limited room in my freezer, so I had to stop. I do this year-round, saving about the same amount of money each week.
Spend time on the internet. Don’t just do what you’ve always done, with your food. Check out new recipes, ideas for food preservation, and ways to use the kitchen gadgets you have. Find out what really is the cheapest way to clean your house. Check Amazon’s Friday sale for potential Christmas gifts cheap. Hey, you’re already killing time on the net just fooling around. You’re reading this, after all! Use some of that time, just once or twice a week, to learn new tactics for saving money in your home. As you do all of this, diligently, you will grow an interest in the hobby of trolling for good deals, which will not only save you more money on what you buy, but it will also save you money on what you spend on entertainment and luxury items, because saving money will become a hobby. As I was cultivating saving money as a hobby, I became more aware of the deals around me, in stores and online. In six months’ time, I have acquired passes for two different movies, passes to the local water park, passes to the local zoo, and three shoe boxes full of samples and freebies that we’ll use on vacations and trips. My budget to go out of town used to be $10 per person on travel shower goodies. Now that budget is zero. Our family budget for movies, water parks, and zoos is zero, so we didn’t save one single cent on those things. But we got to enjoy four special family outings that we don’t normally do, all for free.
In summary, let’s do just a little more math, to demonstrate how much money I saved in just one year, using only the strategies I spelled out here. I saved $135.72 on laundry. I saved $150.00 on cold cereal. I saved $90.00 on Mother’s Day gifts. I saved $286.00 on pre-cut frozen vegetables. That’s a grand total of $661.72, just on the four strategies I’ve shared with you. For most families, that’s how much is spent on holiday gifts, two car payments, six months of auto insurance, or half a mortgage payment. Imagine getting any one of those things, free. That’s what I got for devoting just an hour or two a week, towards turning money-saving into a hobby. How much can you save?
