Category Archives: Saving Money

Saving on Saturday

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One of the most important things to remember is every $1 saved is an accomplishment.  With the huge financial expense of the new HVAC system, I am going to focus more on the little things for saving. The reason is we already do alot of things to save money and in reality, I can’t find much more that way. So now it is back to the basics of saving in every way possible.

I mentioned yesterday that I had not been out to eat breakfast. That is the first way we are saving money!

Another way we are saving money is by using items in our pantry. For us as a family this means that we need convenient foods that are easy to make and filling. Breakfast is one of the hardest meals for me because I don’t have much time to get out the door.  I spend ALOT of time in the Summer preparing food ahead but I also need to add to this during the year. Last night for dinner we had sausage balls and French toast.  I decided to go ahead and make a HUGE batch.  We have been getting six eggs a day so this was a good way also to use up the eggs. I purchased three loaves of French bread at Walmart for $1.47 each ($4.50), used sugar, milk, vanilla and cinnamon. I am going to estimate the entire cost to be $10.  Matt used the Blackstone to fry up the bread. We ended up with our dinner and around 60 additional slices of French toast.  Currently one meal of French toast for one person is $10 so for the same cost we probably have at least 5 meals for our family of five.

The final way we saved money this week is by building shelves out of pallets that we got for free last year. We have used this wood to complete the front part of the new building as well.  I did use part of my Christmas money to purchase the brackets. The total cost for his was around $30 but we have lots more space and I definitely like  organization.

Friday Financial Update

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So this is the much promised post about the big financial change that we have made.  I have hinted at this post on several occasions but did not want to share until everything was complete and final. The reason for this post is very personal, I want to be able to read this in the future, see my rationale and also determine if it worked or not.

We have refinanced the house and rolled the HELOC into it. First the facts, this is a 15 year mortgage with an interest rate of 6.25%. the anticipated maturity date is December 2040. Our age would be 68.

Next, why we choose to re-finance at this time. There are two main reasons that we looked at refinancing now. The first of which is that we or at least I have started to seriously look at and begin to plan for retirement. My top priority going into retirement is to be debt-free. I do not want to have any payments such as mortgage or car. The auto part is really something that I can’t control as much as the mortgage/HELCO.  I knew going in the HELOC was 30 years and my initial plan was to begin making double payments when we pay off the Tahoe in October 26.  The second reason for considering and seriously looking at a re-fi now is that the HELCO was an adjustable rate.  I don’t recall reading this so maybe I missed it. I realized this (my mistake) because the HELCO was a fixed rate for 12 months and then became adjustable. My realization occurred with the notice that it would increase to over 7%.

The problem…. our mortgage was refinanced during COVID at a rate of 2.75%. This has been the one down side and thing that made the decision to re-fi difficulty for me. But when you compare the fact that the HELCO was already high and had the possibility of going even higher then even math said we should re-fi.

We ended up including some cash out when we decided to re-finance in order to reduce our overall debit load and to make paying everything much easier and quicker.  As I mentioned above the interest rate is 6.25% which is less than any credit card at this point.  We will begin making payments on January 1 2026 and begin to make an extra  principal only payment November 2026 which should reduce our term to 8 years or 2034 and our age to 62.

Building Update

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A short recap…. while on vacation, after discovering we have a new fence right on our property line, one of the things we talked about doing was replacing this building.

Initially we were thinking that we would need to move it to allow for clearance to the back of the yard. Luckily that was not the case.  We started the process on August 31st.  You can see the first section of progress here

This ended up being a longer and more expensive project than was expected! But I am super excited to say that we have officially completed the project and it turned out amazing!

We have lots of organized storage place that is both dry and mostly weather proof. We have lights and even a window (see above).

The front is probably my favorite! Made from all wood that was free to us!

The sides have been painted a gray color.

 

Even the back looks nice!

Yay for checking another project off the list FINALLY!

 

 

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A deal is not a good deal if you cant use the item or if it goes bad before you can use it.  I am seeing more and more people talk about couponing again. That is great and I would love to get back to full force but in the mean time, if you are spending money you don’t have on a good deal then you are just dumb.  No one needs 17 bottles of detergent on a shelf!   I just finished working on my Amazon subscribe and save order, I follow a couple of rules, if we don’t need it skip it, if a snack cost more than 45 cent, skip it.  I will pay up to 90 cent for protein or good granola bars.   Today I noticed that I have 4 bottles of Tide on the list as well as a huge container of Tide.  I decided to figure out which was cheaper, turns out the bottles were by one cent an ounce so that is the one that will be delivered at the end of the month.

Last Saturday, I headed to Dollar General to pick up sodas on sale.  I purchased 3 12 packs of Diet Coke and 2 12 packs of Dr. Pepper. I also picked up 6 boxes of water flavors. Total spent $27.22 total saved $23.25!

CVS is a hard store especially when some people count Extra Care Bucks as money and others as coupons. I use them as coupons!  I had 2 ECB, a $4 off a purchase and $2 off a purchase. I was able to use all three and pay twenty seven cents for the following, travel size hair spray, travel size toothpaste, a new bath sponge and 2 carmel candies!

That is how you save money!

Pantry Challenge/ Saving Money

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Yes I am writing this on a Sunday. I did most of the work for this on Saturday. But I wanted to share about the building that feels like it is sucking up most if not all of our time.

I work all summer long to get easy to prepare meals in the freezer to make the school year go easier. I also wanted to start using up alot of the food we have here so that I can reduce the food bill for the rest of the year.  I have  not been to Costco since the first of August before school started.  I am picking up items that we are completely out of but I am making a conscience effort not to buy items unless absolutely needed.  We are about 6 weeks in and at the point where our convivence foods are gone. Yesterday we finished up both the chicken nuggets and bagel bites. One of the items that I have the most of is ground beef. When we purchase a whole cow, we get alot of ground beef and I know we can eat it. I am thinking that at this point we have almost 50 # left in the freezer.   We used up the last of the Costco meatball about a week ago.

On Friday, I took a pound of ground beef and decided to make some meatballs to go with our spaghetti.  They turned awesome, so good in fact that I decided to go ahead and make a huge batch. I turned 5 pounds of ground beef into 96 meatballs that can be used for spaghetti, meatball subs and even Swedish meatballs.

While the last batch of these were baking yesterday, I ended up gathering up all the ingredients for Taco Soup. I decided to make a double batch so that I could can up some for quick and easy lunches.  We are eating the soup for dinner this evening and I will have 5 half pints and 12 pints of taco soup to use for lunches or even future meal!  I am excited to have these convivence items instead of purchasing.

Replacing a Building

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The second thing we decided to accomplish on our vacation was converting the metal building from the fabric and metal tubs to a wooden structure.  We knew it would be a process but I did not realize it would take over a month.  We started with this

We removed the metal to expose the fabric

The fabric was easy to remove but the pole took a little bit more effort.

By the end of the first weekend of at least 15 or more hours of work we were down to the floor.

We used the leftovers/remnant from the kitchen floor to make it harder to lose screws and easier to clean.

We were able to get up most of the walls on that same day but it was another long long day!

Weekend 3 complete and not on to the fourth in the next update!

 

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  1. We have been extremely busy the last several weeks. We are in the process of converting the fabric metal pole structure that covered the beetle (Matt’s Volkswagen) to a  wooden structure covered in metal.  I knew it would be a process but did not think it would take over a month.  We really focused on getting it under roof.  Last Saturday we spent close to 8 hours solid on it and I made the decision that it was not a worth to try and continue at that pace to get it under roof. The current plan is to get a door on tomorrow. A tarp is currently over the roof and  it will likely be a month before we work on the roof.  My current plan is to start sharing pictures tomorrow.
  2. Zach’s truck broke down in the school parking lot on Monday. We had it towed home and then after some working and investigation, it appears that the fuel pump is part or all of the problem. The goal is to get that replaced tomorrow however the part was delayed so it may take a little bit on Sunday as well.
  3. Working has been a bit much. I am struggling to get in a routine. But I am hopeful that things will start to improve.
  4. Next week Braxton’s baseball starts which means that we have at least 3 evening of games.
  5. I am planning to do some big meal preparation over the weekend. The current plan is to make a double batch of taco soup with half or more canned for convivence. The second big preparation is meatball. The Costco meatball are all gone and we have lots of ground beef that can be used.

Saving on Saturday

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It has been a long time since I used coupons. I still deal hunt but find that for the majority of the time, I can save money without coupons. However this changed today!  I have had several reels of Dollar General coupons pop up on my feed. After watching a couple with the same results I decided to give it a try. All these coupons were digital so easy enough in the DG app. I was able to get Diet Cokes for 23 cent each and Mt Dews for 17 cents each, vegetable seeds for a quarter a pack. On my first receipt which included the drinks, I spent 21.06 and saved 40.68!

I also ended up going to Belk’s, where I purchased a sweater for $7.69 which included a $10 birthday coupon for a savings of $62.13!

 

Saving on Saturday- When Life Gives you Lemons Edition

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This year we have new neighbors move in beside of us.  Nothing concerning until he came over and started asking about the property line.  I did not even get concerned then. Next he said that he was having a fence installed to help keep some of his animals from coming over to our house. Sounds like another great idea as I am not fond of having goats on our deck. Next we noticed that he marked the property line from front to back but still I was not all that concerned. We left for our beach vacation and the work started that same day. This is the view we came home to…

 

Frist this is extremely close to the road, 23 feet from the center with 30 feet being the state right of way.

Next it is just ugly you put the back side of the fence toward us!  This fence goes from the road to the woods.  We began talking about how we improve the appearance from our side. Now is where the saving money comes in.  After talking and checking prices we decided to add pickets on our side.   The total cost for just the pickets and nails to attach was $875.  I am going to estimate that we saved the same amount!

 

5 Things Friday

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This first week back at school has been extremely busy, but not in the overwhelming busy way but as in productive busy.
1.We started working on  and almost finished adding pickets to the fence that our neighbor placed on the property line.  We ended up finishing this project on Wednesday evening. I am hoping to post pictures and more of the explanation on Saturday.
2.The chickens have taken more time than normal. On Friday and Saturday, we left the dog cage open and closed it at night. On Saturday night instead of closing the door we moved the new chickens into the coop. The new chickens have responded beautifully, they go up in the coop every night.  HOWEVER, two of our oldest chickens have decided that they do not want to go in the coop.   For the first three nights we moved these stubborn chickens but we have decided to let them be. The coop is secure but they need to learn.
3.On Wednesday, I noticed that my favorite farm stand had corn on sale for fifty cent an ear when you bought 5 dozen.   I purchased these along with several other good things. I was able to vacuum seal these into our family size portions.  Zach also worked on his truck most of the evening.
4.Both Zach and Kendall have been schedule to work every day this week. We did not complain as this is the last week before they head back to school. Zach has had football practice everyday along with a game on Thursday.
5. I want to end on a positive note, I have continued/restarted listing to my Bible reading in the afternoons coming home from work this has given me back a good half an hour.