Jill Russo Foster

Simplifying By Doing It Ourselves

We have made choices in our lives to do things ourselves and not pay for the service. It’s a personal choice that we are happy with.

With that in mind, I want to share with you what we personally don’t spend money or reduce our spending on in our household.

Our Home:

Yard work
Spring and fall yard clean up
Snow shoveling
Gutter cleaning
Power washing
Trash / recycle – would have to ay a trash hauler as our town doesn’t provide this service
Rain barrel – we collect rain water and use this to water the garden and plants
Compost Bin – our town has a goal to go waste free, so we are able to take our food waste to the town for compositing

By doing these things ourselves, we save money each and every month that we can use in a variety of ways (reduce debt, increase savings).

Simplifying Home Improvements

If you have followed my blog, you know that we do projects around our home all the time. We typically a yearly list to do.

With more time on our hands and being a homeowner, means there is always a project / improvement that needs to be done, some by us and others by professionals.

Our first project this year was to replace the grass between the road and sidewalk with plants. Delivery trucks parking on the sidewalk and the salt from the winter storms always made this grassy area a mess. Our hosta plants needed to be split, so this solved the problem. We removed the grass and placed weed block down, added the plants and completed it with mulch. No cost to us, just labor over two weekends.

Next, we starting to replace fence panels. We are still doing this ourselves, by replacing a panels or two when we have a few hours and the weather cooperates. We’ll do what we can and at a slow pace. It sounds easier than it is, because it’s not only replacing the panel, we need to breakdown and transport the old panel to the town’s transfer waste station.

As you know, home improvement projects and maintenance are easier to do now versus having a major emergency home improvement project later.

Simplifying By Reducing

With more time on my hands, I got to thinking about what I could reduce or eliminate to save money. Honestly, I always think about this. For me, it comes down to spend that money now on something or save it for later.

What items do I purchase that I could use another option? Here are some of the things I have changed in our house:

Swapped out a magnetic white board monthly calendar for buying a yearly calendar.
Used my cell phone sharable calendar instead of the paper planner.
Changed from plastic containers to glass jars and from plastic bags to silicone reusable bags.
Using essential oils to make my own cleaners versus buying individual cleaners for parts of my home.

How much can you save by making small changes?

Simplifying Our Entertainment

Being home meant more time on my hands. For me, this could lead to more spending and I (or my budget) wasn’t going to allow that.

For us, we have reduced our cable TV to basic and have one streaming service. That’s all we have and I wasn’t going to pay for any more.

We have kept ourselves entertained with free stuff. We have watched movies on the channels that we have. I was able to watch the movie Hidden Figures that I had wanted to. I highly recommend it if you haven’t watched it. We explored a variety of free services. We have always used Hoopla from the library for free movies. We’ve toured places what we haven’t been to, such as virtual tours of museums and national parks. I’ve read many books that I was planning on reading that I never got to. We broke out our board games and played for entertainment. We have explorer new locations for our daily walks. All this without spending a penny.

If we can do this, you can too.

Simplifying By Not Shopping

Being home with the Covid 19 requirements, caused me to spend more. Business was slower, minimal interaction and more time on my hands, cause me to spend more. Not a good thing.

Once I made this realization, I needed to take action. First, I had to understand that because something is a good buy, doesn’t mean I need it. This was a big step. Next, I eliminated apps on my phone and unsubscribed from emails from companies, reducing the temptation to spend.

Now before I buy something, I ask myself do I really need this? Is this something I would have bought without a sale? If the answer is “yes”, then I make the purchase.

Simplifying By Reducing

Yesterday, I told you what we did about the paper clutter. Today, let’s talk about the other clutter that was in our home.

To be honest, we have simplified and reduce a lot, but we still have more to go. We inherited many items from our families and I found that the sentimental items were the hardest to get rid of. For me this was the hardest. But I have come up with a solution that works for me and maybe you too.

We purchased our families home. And along with that came these items. What was I do with them? At first it was easily to toss many items. But then, I was left with the hard stuff. Those sentimental items that I didn’t want to keep but didn’t want to toss either. That was my dilemma.

This is what I have done to simplify the items in our house

My dad was a great athlete and had so much memorabilia. First, I decided that I wanted to remember all of this, so I took photos of all the items I wanted to remember. I have the memory and the photo now, so I was ready to get rid of the items. But what could I do with these items, it didn’t seem right to toss them. For his school memorabilia, I contact the schools and donated the items – yearbooks, sports uniforms, programs, pins, equipment, etc.
Nostalgic items was another category. I purchased a book called Trash or Treasure and contacted collectors. Here’s a couple of examples – I sold a metal toy to a collector for $500, I sold my mother’s cameras to a company in the mid-west, family china to a company that buys it for people seeking replacement items for their collections.
Boxes of newspaper clipping, from my fathers sports career. Just finished scanning all of these while at home during the pandemic.

I am down to the last few items and then I will be done. We have eliminated boxes and boxes from our basement and I am happy with where the items are now..

Simplifying By Reducing Paper

Do you find yourself swimming in paper? We did.

There are things you need to keep (tax records, purchase receipts, home expenses and more), but there are the other things that we seemed to keep as well. So much so that we had several files cabinets worth.

Over the past few years, our goal was to simplify and reduce the paper files we kept. This is what we did:

Scanned and digitized the family photos, slides and movies – this was a huge project
Scanned bank / credit card and investment statements
Eliminated manuals – we can look it up if we need to refer to this online
Scanned income tax returns
Scanned medical records
Scanned and organized recipes – this eliminated all the recipe cards from my mother and many cook books too

Now most files are scanned and backed up and the paper is eliminated. It’s such a great feeling when there is less paper. As an added bonus, we are down to one file cabinet. We sold the other file cabinets for some extra cash.

Remember to check to find out what you are required to keep and for how long before getting rid of your paper.

Simplifying By Opting Out Of Mail

This was another biggy for us. Way too much mail. This needed to be simplified.

I do want all my bills in a paper format. Personally, I keep them to see what’ happening – so I want this mail.

But I didn’t want a lot of the other mail – catalogues and magazines. It seemed to me that if I made a purchase from a company then I would not only get that company’s catalogue list but on other’s too. I am not going to kid you, this was a lot of effort to get off mailing lists. You can visit my resources page to find that companies that you can opt out from. But I took it s step further and called all of the catalogues and requested that I be removed from there list. Yes, it’s time consuming but it has worked. We simplified by eliminating these catalogues thus reducing that amount of mail that comes, reducing the temptation to make a unwanted purchase and saving trees.

As for magazines, we didn’t renew our subscriptions and let them run out. I wasn’t finding the time to read them, so they were piling up creating clutter (not a good feeling). Now, if I want to read a magazine I can check out the magazine through my local library and read it online. RB Digital from the library works for us. Again, we reduced that amount of mail that was coming in, reducing the clutter from the unread issues and saving money by not paying for the subscriptions and savings the paper.

We receive less mail now. In fact, there are days with no mail at all.

Simplifying By Opting Out Of Emails

Are you overwhelmed by all your emails in your inbox? I was!

Having several email addresses and tons of emails was too much for me.

I took the time to opt out of many emails. First, I eliminated emails that I never subscribed to. There was a lot of those.

Next, I made some conscious choices about others. There were some that were no longer relevant to me. Some that I never got around to reading. Some that I subscribed to because I made a purchase(s).

Less in my inbox is a relaxing feeling for me. I don’t feel pressured by another to-do in my life.

I also eliminated so email accounts to have less to go through each and every day. For me less is better and saves me time and money.

Simplified My Exercise Routine

Along with a healthy eating, for us comes exercise. Since the stay-at-home orders in early March, we changed our exercise to walking in the neighborhood. We walk difference ways, sometimes along the water, sometimes in the area, sometimes on a trail all within walking distance from our home – no car / gas needed.

It’s been almost four months of daily walking, regardless of the weather we walk and walk. One thing we have done is to combine exercise with errands. We are fortunate to live close enough to town and we do errands on some walks. It could be to the Post Office or the bank or the drug store and many more. But about once a week, our walk includes errands. It’s fun, gets things done and no need to use the car or pay for a gym membership. And as a bonus, we have met people along the way that we never knew before.

We get our exercise in and save money. I wouldn’t trade this for the world.