Save a penny!

I've started praying about this blog.  Yes, really praying?  I've neglected it to focus more on my family (which is a good thing!) and I finally feel that I have a somewhat (or not ha!) routine down that maybe I can actually do something with it.  I pray that it blesses others and write about our family's adventures and mishaps, maybe you can give me advice, and maybe I can help you out!  I've  had quite a few people ask me lately how we "do it".  Living basically on one income, both of us at home (my husband has a freelance graphic design business from home), and survive. Well, I don't have an answer because we are still trying to figure it out, living day by day.  But our way of life has changed tremendously, since back in the days of being child free, to these past 7 months when our second daughter was born.  So I thought I'd talk about ways we try to save money, or more like spend money wisely.  I'm not perfect, we sometimes (or many times) make the wrong decisions, but here are some things that have worked well for us.

* Stay home!  Seriously...have you not noticed the price of gas?  It takes us 30 minutes to get to the nearest city, and that's just to get to the edge of it.  To get anywhere in the city, that's 40+ minutes.  So, I generally go to town twice a week. Mondays, when I go teach at a Home School academy, and when we go to church.  Typically when we go to church, that's all we do in town, unless we are visiting with friends afterwards.  but when I go to teach, I try to make the most of that trip.  Stop at the grocery store on my way home, any other errands.  Sometimes it becomes the day I dread because of how long it is, and I'm typically alone with two kids, but it saves a lot in gas.  Sometimes we do have to go to town another time during the week, and we maximize it.  What do we need?  What are we about to run out of that we will need in 3-4 days?  I don't remember the last time I was at the mall, or went shopping for fun, etc.

* Food Budget
I hate to use the word budget, because this is one of our downfalls.  We try to budget, do it for a month or so, then stop or just fail at it.  But, since I stopped working, we've had to cut our grocery bill down tremendously. Ironic as I stopped working when I had my second child, so our family grew, and our grocery bill went down.  I got paid every 2 weeks, and would go to Walmart and easily drop $200 right after getting paid.  Not any more.  There was so much CRAP (sorry for the vernacular) that we were buying.  So much processed food that was junk.  We are eating better, making more things from scratch, buying less convenience food, and no junk/filler food we don't need.  Now we are not perfect.  We don't have a "whole foods diet" and I buy stuffing in a box because..well..yeah.  But, no more soda, frozen biscuits, etc.  Most of our "sweets" we make. Last week in the span of 3 days, I made banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, and apple pie.  We really don't eat sweets like that real often, that was just kind of a fluke week, but all of that was made from scratch.

* Animals
We've really had to look at what our animals are costing us.  We used to have goats.  We wanted to milk them, but we didn't have the right set up.  So they were pets, not giving us anything in return, and during the winter, we had to buy hay.  So we sold them.  Eventually we'd like to get milking goats...when we are READY!

* Garden
Last year was our first year of canning our garden.  We also went to an apple orchard and did a lot of canning of applesauce, apple pie filling, and apple butter.  Our canned good this year consisted of green beans, spaghetti sauce, and peach jam.  We grew more than just those things, but didn't produce enough to can.  Those have really helped us in cutting down on the food bill.  This year, we plan to grow more, and can more.  Our garden is mostly started from seeds instead of buying plants.  It's really not hard to do seed starts, and our tomatoes from seed did better than the tomato plants we paid outrageous prices for.

* Cloth Diapers
This has really saved us huge money.  I already did a post about this. But living on one income...there's no way we could afford $50/month in diapers

* Breastfeed
The littlest is 7 months and still going strong with breastfeeding!  Cost? $0 I could go on and on about the health benefits, but since it's a money related post, I'll just leave it at that!

* Heat
We invested in an outdoor wood stove. It plugs into our duct work and we have an electric blower to blow the head from the stove into our house.  This saves tremendously on our heating bill.  While the blower is electric, it still costs a lot less to run that, then to run our heat furnace.

* Home Birth
We had an aaaaammmmaaaazzzziiinnnggg home birth experience.  I won't try to convince anybody to do a home birth.  You birth where you feel safest, home, birthing center, hospital.  But I can tell you that it was a great experience for us, we had a qualified midwife, and it fit our lifestyle.  Our home birth was about 20% the cost of a normal uncomplicated hospital birth.

*Vehicles
We drive older vehicles that are paid off, we have no car payments.  We will probably have to replace our van, which is our main family vehicle in a few years. I'm not sure what we will do then, but I can tell you it will be an older van, just a bit newer than what we have now.

* Social Life
When we first got married, we went out all  the time.  I also didn't realize how much "money" we had then compared to now.  We now rarely go out to eat, movies, and we value our money more than to just go blow it.  That doesn't mean we don't ever go out and do anything, but they are treasured dates when it does happen!  We value our friends, and enjoy having them over to visit, and that's free!

*Stop Shopping
Like when I said, stay home.  I don't shop for fun, and if I did, I'd spend money.  When we go grocery shopping, I have a list.  We are not perfect, and probably always buy something not on the list.  But if you stop shopping, except when necessary, you can't spend money!

* Buy Used
Almost anything we buy "big" is used.  And kids?  Most baby gear is used, (EXCEPT CAR SEATS), many toys are used, and all of their clothes was used, or gifted to us.

Those are the main things that come to mind.  We are not perfect, make mistakes, and still trying to figure this out.  But those are some things that have worked well for us.