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!

One of the biggest focus of the past couple of months for both Matt and myself has been our budget. I can say that as long as I can remember,I knew what a budget was and usually had a budget either in my head or written on paper. Only one problem, I have always in the past viewed a budget as a guide. I plan to spend my money this way but if something else pops up or if I over spend in this area then I just juggle things. As you can probably imagine,this has lead to alot of difficulty. Over the past several month, I have really taken to heart Dave Ramsey statement “Every dollar has a name and a place.” We have made adjustments to out grocery budget based on the actual amount we have been spending. And I have been really trying to keep an accurate record of where are money is going. Things are starting to come easier and make more sense and in September the plan is that we will actual have enough money to do a major home improvement and still meet all the requirements we have. Another awesome change is that Matt and I are talking not only about the budget but actual spending. So this week, I realized that we need to focus and adjust our gas budget. This has actually been an ongoing thing. Originally I budgeted $400 a month, for the past 2 months I have changed this amount to $100 a week. I have begun to notice that most weeks both of the autos need gas so I tend to go over this $100. Matt and I talked about it made a change to monitor this. Yesterday, both the car and the van needed gas. We were driving the car so we ended up filling it up, which only left $42 for use in the van. We put that amount in last night and I hope to see that we could stick to the $100 a week if we adjust our thinking just a little bit. My thought is we alternate completing filling one car one week and the the second the next. This way we should be able to stick to the $100 budget.

In other exciting budget related news- I realized last night and verified today that I actually was below budget last month for groceries because I had included a $50 gas card from Walmart in my amounts! Watching each dollar is actually helping!