Sunday, November 20, 2011

Saving Money- Something you think about

Saving money is not just something you do or in my case something you want and try to do it truly is a way of thinking about things.  I actually had started this post several days ago and just did not get enough of my thoughts down on paper.  Saving money for us means we think about things in a different way.

 First, especially when buying grocery type items this means that we have to make two important decisions; a) is the item on sale/ do we have a coupon ? b) how much or how little of this do we really need today. A great example of this is Matt when to Aldi to pick up flour and other items that we did purchase at Costco. All the kids LOVE Poptarts and would eat them every morning for breakfast if we let me. We only saw Strawberry Poptarts at Costco so we didn't get them even tho we have been out for several weeks.  The Aldi brand Poptarts were $1.83, Matt remembered that I had been able to purchase Poptarts for 1.50 or less with coupons in the past so he only purchased one box.  The same items apply when I do shop sales, when I find the lowest price I have seen or just a really good deal on an item then I usually buy the limit or the number of coupons I have. An example, Sugar  a good price is $2.00 or less so last time I found this price I used all 3 coupons I had, and I have 1 bag still in the pantry.

Next before making any purchase even if it is going out to eat we have to decide why we are considering going out. Today, we had decided that we would go out to lunch after church with friends. Our friends decided not to eat out so we decided to come home and eat out of the fridge.  The purpose of going out to eat was to enjoy time with friends not to eat out. We ended up saving at least $30 by not going out to eat today.

Finally, keeping a list of things that will need to be purchased in the future and buying things on sale or with rewards reduces spending and increases saving. I have been able to use diaper rewards to purchase several puzzle and other items that I use as gifts.


In other posts I have talked about some other ways we save money, but in reality deciding that we wanted to save money and then using that as one of the things we base decisions on has really helped in our lives.

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