Family Finances

Simplification – Duplicates Be Gone

Simplifying the kitchen is good thing and makes what we need easier to locate when needed. spring cleaning

During this stay at home time, we have begun getting rid of duplicates. Really, how many potato peelers can one kitchen need? Not to mention the hamburger flippers, ladles and more.

We have begun going through the process of cleaning out the kitchen cabinets and drawers. I can’t believe how much we have accumulated over the years. Maybe, its time to pretend we are moving and do a deep cleaning? Think about all the money we have wasted with buying these items! It’s time to think save money instead of buying another item.

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 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 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.

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.

Simplifying By Automating

Another way we simplified our finances was to automate our savings.

Each pay period (after the direct deposit), we contribute to our emergency savings. We have done this through an automatic transfer from our checking (where the direct deposit occurs) to our savings. A specific amount of money is moved from the checking to the saving each and every payday. No more I’ll save after I pay my bills. You know this story, there is never anything leftover to save. So get in the habit of paying yourself first and then you will start to see you saving grow. This was great with the pandemic and less income coming in, we had our savings to fall back on.

You can do this too. You can set it up through you bank and set up an automated transfer or you can have your paycheck split between two accounts (checking and savings). Either way works. Bottom line, you need to have a savings account for whatever life throws at you. Start your automated savings today. You won’t be sorry.

Simplifying Our Meals

I cannot imagine an easier way to plan meals than being a part of a CSA. This was a huge incentive towards simplify our lives.

For us, we get an email two days before the pick up of the items of the week. This gives me time to shop for groceries, check out new recipes and plan the weeks meals. This makes my life easier as it takes the guess work out of what’s for dinner and as an added bonus gives us plenty to take for lunch and snacks.

I am able to plan the week based on the CSA items and sales / specials from the local grocery store. This is a big money saver for us.

No more, saying what’s for dinner and ordering take out. This not only helps our budget, but it’s a time saver too. For most people, food (groceries, eating out, take out, beverages, etc.) is the biggest part of your budget. Meal planning helps us to plug the holes in the budget easily.