This is a series in the style of The Frugal Girl’s Five Frugal Things, where I post about what I’ve done lately to save money and make things stretch in order to further our financial goals, which currently include us paying off a decent hunk of debt. I encourage you to play along and post your own weekly frugal wins in the comments section below!
To nobody’s surprise, I am, once again, publishing this about a month after my last one. At some point, you’d think I’d just accept that maybe blogging has to take a backseat for awhile, but I LOVE blogging, so I keep on plugging away. (Seriously, though — this is what I dream of during particularly busy seasons. I think to myself: ‘When it’s winter, these are all the blog posts I just can’t wait to write…’ or I delude myself with imagining that I should at least be able to keep up on these weekly frugal wins, IF I’M JUST REALLY INTENTIONAL ABOUT IT.
After finally reading Four Thousand Weeks the other month, I’ve just come to accept the fact that we’re all more than a bit delusional about time in our productivity-crazed culture, but that still doesn’t stop me from dreaming about being able to publish 2-3 posts a week again.
(Hey, we all need dreams to keep us going, eh?!)
Anyway, life’s slowed down flower-farm-wise lately (just a bit), but now basically all our time has been hijacked by medical appointments and trying to figure out our financial situation for the winter since the farm didn’t make quite enough to float us through until spring. So Matt’s found a job (actually working for the friend I do some marketing for), and that’s that. I’m super grateful things were able to work out the way they have, but it will mean a lot more is put back on my plate.
In the meantime, we’re still plugging away at our credit card debt (I think we’ll have it paid off in the spring for sure!) and plugging away at our goal to become “true” minimalists (at least how we define it, anyway). For this immediate week ahead, my main goal is to finish up all the Christmas shopping and get around to some of the nagging tasks that have been on my to-do list forever (like setting up autopays for certain bills).
Here are some of our frugal wins over the past month:
Note: There may be affiliate links to books and products mentioned in this post.
We went to the zoo on their special discount day
Here’s kind of a funny story behind this discount — we’d originally planned on taking our kids to the zoo a few weeks prior (at full admission price) because we’d been wanting to do something fun forever and figured we could finally make it happen over the kids’ fall break. What actually happened was that our oldest started throwing up on our drive up north to actually go to the zoo, so we ended up just grabbing lunch (since we’d planned to eat somewhere by the zoo) and then heading right back home.
While the sickness wasn’t fun to deal with, the timing ended up being a bit fortuitous, as the zoo started offering a drastically discounted price on admission on Wednesdays just ten days after we’d planned on going, so rather than spending around $85 to get us all in, we only ended up spending $30. Going to the zoo in the colder months is a bit of a crap shoot, of course, but boy, did we luck out — the day we went out wasn’t too terribly cold (around 50 degrees), and all the animals were actually the most active that any of us had EVER seen them. Such a fun day! (And because we’d ended up putting it off, it meant my mom could come with us too, so it seems like it was just meant to be.)
I requested virtual telehealth visits where possible
My baby’s cardiologist has been going back and forth about what to do about the hole in her heart that she was born with, and he was seriously contemplating doing open heart surgery possibly even before the end of the year, which was not in the original plans, lemme tell you.
Long story short, we’ve had a TON of medical appointments with various specialists to try and get everything figured out about whether that was in her best interest over the past six weeks, and since all specialists are located at least a 90-minute drive from us (and some more than two hours away), it became paramount that we try and feel out which ones we could feasibly do over the phone in a telehealth call. Sometimes that wasn’t possible when a physical examination or a procedure was needed (obviously), but there were plenty of times when the doctor just wanted a basic consultation.
We were able to move about a third of our visits to virtual ones, which drastically cut down on gas costs, not to mention time.
(In case you’re wondering, we’ve been told after the latest echo on her heart that we’re going to wait until her birthday in April to see if she’ll gain a bit more weight, and then we’ll make a final decision about when and how the hole will be closed.)
I packed lunches on the road to save us from eating out
For medical appointments, we’ll often just end up grabbing a quick bite from Chick-Fil-A on the way back, since it’s usually just one of us with Naomi and it’s the most convenient option on already-stressful days. However, when we’ve had the whole family with us, eating out gets really expensive and FAST, so we’ve been choosing to pack lunches and snacks some of the times to curb costs.
One of those times was the day we went to the zoo. We’d already planned on eating out that night for dinner as part of the excursion, but with the zoo being two hours away, we knew we’d be away from home for two meals, so I just took about 45 minutes the morning of and packed extra special lunch bags for everybody. I packed some surprise treats, sandwiches and sides based on everyone’s personal preferences, and I even drew a different animal on each person’s lunch bag. You’d think I’d planned the most elaborate gift, the kids got so excited. It was a strong reminder to me that sometimes taking the time to go the extra mile really goes a long way when it comes to young kids. They so easily find joy in everything, and it made me feel really good, too.
I used a Black Friday code on an online course I was wanting
I’ve never been huge on Black Friday deals, but this year we actually took advantage of several, starting with an online course I’d been wanting to take for awhile, which I got on Black Friday for something like $50 off. I also bought 90% of our Christmas gifts online on Black Friday, and Matt and I went into a sporting goods store that morning too so he could get himself a couple new pairs of running shoes and gym shorts, which he was in desperate need of. All told, we probably saved around $200 by taking advantage of deals that weekend.
I sold something on Facebook Marketplace
Although I could have been selling a TON of stuff over the last year and a half as we’ve drastically downsized our possessions as we move towards minimalism, I usually don’t bother, simply because it’s usually not worth the time and headache of dealing with pickups and people flaking out and all the time it takes to research and list everything. However, if I have something that’s worth a bit more that I think will sell quickly, I’ll sometimes give it a go.
This time, we had a kid’s chair that I figured would go fast, and I was right — I had it sold within about a day of listing for $50.
Other Frugal Wins
- I got my check from Rakuten from all the cash back for the last couple months (almost $50 this time!). I say it all the time, but if you aren’t doing some kind of easy cash back thing through your network browser online, you’re leaving money on the table! (Bonus: If you sign up now for Rakuten through a referral link–ahem, such as mine–we BOTH get $40 in cash back.)
- We bought one of the kids’ Christmas gifts off of Facebook Marketplace (in nearly new condition, too!). The original gift would have been out of our budget entirely, but this saved us a couple hundred bucks and put it in the realm of possibility for us. We’re excited to see what they think!
- I checked for promo codes every time I shopped for anything online, whether that be for Christmas or flower farming or whatever. I also always checked for cash back through Rakuten, too. (This helped me get an additional 20% off on clothing for Christmas, free shipping on a seed order, and more.)
- We were over our grocery budget in November, so I pulled way back on spending at the grocery store, started being more intentional with planning meals from our pantry, and cut out superfluous Diet Dr. Pepper drink runs to McDonald’s 🙂
- I got many of this year’s Christmas picture books (mentioned in this post) on sale as part of Amazon’s 3-for-the-price-of-2 deal that they have going on
How’s your Christmas planning going?
