Binkies and Briefcases

Now that we are starting to settle in -and loving it!- hopefully I will be able to get back on track with this whole blogging thing. I miss you guys.

Truth be told, we got a new-to-us  (refurbished from eBay) computer a few weeks ago when our old laptop died and I am slow to adjust to the switch over to a Mac. I still have the kind of cell phone where you have to buy minutes from the drug store, so I guess you could say I take longer than most to adapt to technology. Ironic, for a blogger, I guess. Although it’s lovely, I still have no idea how to do anything on this MacBook Pro my husband surprised me with for my birthday. It’s bad, my slowness on this thing, I tell you. I can’t even figure out how to open my son’s online report card right now, let alone figure out how to upload all our camera and photo editing software. I’ll learn, I promise. But please bear with me in the meantime. 

Anyway, we LOVE our new house. We are tucked back just off a main road, but in the semi-country and our lot backs up to some farmland. This was the view from our bedroom window yesterday morning when we woke up. (Picture copied directly  from my husband’s Facebook page.)

It’s pretty amazing. I love it. However, being in the new house also comes with gigantic mortgage payments and property taxes and settlement costs all that not-so-fun stuff that means we are going to need to stretch our budget for a little while.

I’ve been really loving following along with Rebecca and her Finances on Friday series, sharing how she pinched pennies throughout the week.  (Side note: I am in serious hard core love with Rebecca’s blog. She was the very first blogger I started to follow years and years ago and I still check her blog every day to see if she has posted anything new.) I know some other bloggers do a similar post on Fridays too, so I thought I’d play along for a while.   

Here are a few things I’ve been doing to save and/or make money: 

-I made almost every meal at home. (We cheated when I got sick and Eddie picked up dinner. I also went out to lunch with Meredith, but it was legetimately for work, so I get to save my receipt and count it as a business expense.) 

-I have not gotten meat on the past 3 grocery shopping trips. We had meat (chicken, fish, ground beef, sausage) in the freezer, so I’ve been using that instead. 

-I did not buy much produce at the store. I went to our local orchard, which is closer to us than the grocery store anyway, and bought apple seconds and milk. I was going to make apple sauce, but the seconds were in such good shape that we’ve just been using them for eating. Meredith also brought us some Asian pears as a housewarming gift, which was very thoughtful. We have vegetables in the freezer. So, the only thing I bought at the grocery store was bananas, and a bunch of bananas only cost around $1. 

-Sadly, I stopped having our milk delivered. The orchard is now only little over a mile away and they sell local eggs, milk that does not contain growth hormones, and pastured beef. It’s cheaper than the other dairy we were using and there is no delivery fee, so it is no longer worth it for us to use a milk man. 🙁

-I applied for two paid writing opportunities, one through the blog and one in-print locally.     

-I’ve started taking the girls to the library more regularly while Nick is at school. Abby loves checking out books for herself (Would you believe I have never allowed that before because when Nick was younger he was too rough with them and they got destroyed) and the library has a bunch of puzzles that the girls like to do.  Don’t worry about Nick, he gets to check out books from the school library. 

-I bought bread flour. I have a vision that I am going to start making our bread. I have a rarely used bread machine and I also have a new wheat grinder from my mom. I haven’t crossed the wheat grinding bridge yet. I need to learn how to actually make halfway decent bread before I start grinding wheat too. Baby steps. I can’t jump into the deep end of Hippieville headfirst.

-Abby has been going to a free (yes FREE!) ballet class. It’s an awesome mission that was started by some young women in our area. They are only allowed to dance to Christian music and wear modest costumes for their performances. That’s more than okay by me.

-Nicholas will also start going to a karate class at our church that has a similar mission this coming week.

-When we DID get take-out, the kids all shared one meal. (The taco kit from Chipotle plus whatever I don’t eat from my burrito bowl is more than enough food for all of them. They’re still small. Don’t worry, they aren’t starving.)  

-I didn’t buy anything for the house. Not one thing. Not even though our guest bath and master bedroom currently have no curtains which makes certain situations ahem a little awkward.  We hung up curtains we already had in the kids’ bedrooms even though they don’t match the new decor at all. But my AMAZING blog friends sent us a housewarming card with a very generous Home Depot gift card inside of it, so the curtain situation will be cleared up very soon.   

-Instead of buying cereal and instant oatmeal at the store last week, I bought rolled oats from the dry goods section. I got a huge bag for less than $1. My plan was to make granola or, you know, regular old oatmeal for breakfasts. They wound up going into oatmeal cookies instead. Ooops. (I’m not sorry.)

-We have been using our steam mop to clean our floors. We’ve had it for years, but rarely used it. I’m loving it now. It cleans and sanitizes our floors and only uses water, so I don’t have the cost or the worry of using chemicals around the kids. 

-I only showered twice this week. Mostly because I was sick in bed, but it still counts as water conservation, right? 

-I did not buy sandwich bags, even though I am out of them. I sent lunches to school/work in reusable containers or wrapped in saran wrap. 

-I actually packed Eddie’s lunch once. I don’t usually do this because he’s a big boy and he can do it himself and I have three other children to take care of, but he leaves super early in the morning and often gets home late, so he doesn’t usually do it out of fear of waking the kids banging around in the kitchen. Or just because he forgets. And that leads to a lot of unhealthy and expensive lunches at the drive thru. So maybe (MAYBE) I’ll start packing it more. I said maybe. 

-Since I was sick, Eddie stayed home on Wednesday and worked a little bit from home, which saved us gas money. 

-When we couldn’t use our regular detergent in our new high efficiency washing machine, we used the other stuff we had on hand (OxyClean and Woolite) instead of buying more right away. I don’t make my own laundry detergent because, well, I don’t feel like it. 

Wow, that list is a lot longer than I expected it to be. Do you have any relatively painless ways to save money? My wallet and I could use a few more ideas.