A list of the things we have done or are currently doing to save money :
- No heat or air for the past month! The goal is another month or 6 weeks. The last several days have seen highs in the upper 80s but with low 60s or 50s at night, we have survived with ceiling fans. I can’t wait to see how much this has effected our power bill.
- By switching our cell phone bill to my name, we increased our discount by 2% and for some reason they applied the discount differently as well. As a result, our total cell phone bill is over $50 less starting in October!
- Matt has been researching our cable tv and its charges. We were both really surprised to find $10 charge for on demand items that we have been paying for over a year that simply we don’t use. In addition, we are planning on dropping our cable tv entirely in the month of November, when our contract is up. We should see this reduce our monthly bills by $100 a month. We know that the first 2 months will be sent on obtaining boxes but still $100 a month is HUGE!
- Matt cut his own hair yesterday. The current decision is that some things are just better left to the pros. Hair cuts being one of them!
- We are continuing to clean out our freezers. A major shopping trip is planned for next weekend but we are continuing to eat what we have. A good example is today, for lunch everyone chose a left over for lunch. At dinner, I used left over taco meat and made a taco bake which basically was a free meal!
- By combining discounts, I was able to purchase a new comforter set for our bed for less than half of the advertised price including shipping and tax. I will definitely be posting pictures of that after it arrives.
- I was able to purchase 3 Diet Cokes and 2 bottles of dish detergent at CVS today for $0.34 and left with $2.50 in ECB. I started with NONE! I did use a rain check
- As I was cleaning at work last week, I found a huge stack of papers that have been sitting in the same place for 9 months. My first thought was to toss them but then I realized wait they have only been printed on one side. So I brought the stack home, cut off the corners with the staples and not have an entire pack of paper to use for printing and the kids art work. I honestly have not bought paper in over two years. We print a lot but keep a scrap paper bin at church and then recycle all we get here. This saves us a bunch on paper. I do have some “clean” paper for use for official things but have found that no one care what the back of my coupons or list say and the kids are so used to coloring on paper that they use at least 10 sheets a day for art!
So it is important to see savings as a marathon not a sprint!
