Jill Russo Foster

Tips for Successful Personal Finances

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Simplifying Buying When Not Needed

How many times have you gone out and made a purchase only to come home to find out that you already had the item?  This used to be us. 

Simplifying the kitchen is good thing makes what we need easier to locate when needed.  Simplifying and organizing has been our mission.  Now our kitchen cabinets and grouped together – one shelf for condiments, one for soups and other canned goods, one for pastas, etc.  Kitchen cabinets a mess. Items put on any shelf and not grouped together.

Now it’s so much easier to see what is needed before going shopping and not may unnecessary purchases (all while saving money).

Simplifying One Times Use Items

Next, we are simplifying by getting iod of items the are one-time use items.

What items are in our kitchen that we only use for one purpose.  These are taking up space and we can do without these.  Think apple slicer, we can cut the apple with a knife.  Think popsicle molds, how many times have I used them.  I can only think of one time.  We are working our way through the cabinets and drawers in our home.  How many of these items do you have in your home?

Items are piling up and will be ready to donate soon.

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 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.