Monday, September 5, 2011

Saving Money

Since my last post with long and about our budget, I thought I would share 5 ideas that we are using to reduce our expenses.
1. Re-use paper, in the past 18 months, I have used less than 1 pack (500) sheet of new paper. Instead, I asked our church staff to save the mess ups and other papers that they no longer need. We use the second side. The girls LOVE to color, draw and write. This way they can be as creative and practice as much as they like and I don't sweat it.
2. Plastic containers instead of sandwich/zipper bags. I try to use this simply because they don't cost anything to use the second or fifth time. We stick them in the dishwasher and then under the cabinet.
3. Brown bag lunch- This is the hardest for me but after looking at the cost of lunch ($5) a day vs taking left-overs or a salad ($3 for a week) then I just figure out ways to take other things instead of sandwiches for myself, Haley and Lily. I also bring my own drinks. I average 4 can drinks a day and at a savings of $.20 each that is $.80. I am very lucky that we have a small fridge in our office that holds 9 drinks.
4. Re-use grocery bags instead of buying liners for the diaper pail, small trash cans. We also use these bags to hold and throw away cat litter as well.
5. Creative cooking- We save money by purchasing Angel Food, I also purchased a produce box this summer. The one downside to both of these is that you often get things you are not used to eating. So that is where creative cooking comes in handy. An example, in our Angel Food box this month were 2 bags of frozen spinach. I have never cooked with spinach and didn't remember liking the taste. So I used it in a cassrole tonight for dinner. It ended up not being so bad, in fact I am taking some for lunch tommorow as well. We also make a focused efforted on eating left-overs. So we may use as lunch or last week we combined different items and ended up cleaning out the fridge just prior to Zach's party.

Leave a comment with your best money saving idea!

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