As a single-income preacher’s family with 4 kids, people often ask how we live on one income. Our church takes very good care of us, but in order for me to stay home and care for my family full-time, we have come up with creative ways to stretch our budget further. I’ve recently begun making a bit of money blogging, but for years this wasn’t the case.
There are so many, many ways to save money, and I think it would drive any one of us crazy to try to implement them all at once (or ever!) but here are a few suggestions that have really helped us:
1) Use LivingSocial or Groupon for eating out. Obviously, the cheapest way to save money on eating out is to not do it. But I know very few families who have completely cut out this luxury. If you live in or near a larger city*, Groupon has a new restaurant coupon up almost every single day! And we have found that we are trying some places that we wouldn’t otherwise try. Here’s how it works: Restaurant A puts up a coupon on Groupon or Living Social The savings are usually 50%- you pay $20 for $40 worth of food, for example. We use Groupon for our dates about 80% of the time.
Then when you go eat, if you don’t go over the $40 amount, you don’t have any other expense except for the tip!
*Even if you don’t live near a large city, you can still take advantage of Groupon while traveling. Just takes a little planning ahead.
2) Use dollar stores. While we all know that dollar stores are full of junk that will break in a day, there are also some incredible deals. My favorite deal? The pregnancy tests at Dollar Tree for $1. We also can buy Nature’s Own bread at Dollar Tree, whereas it’s usually at least $2 a loaf elsewhere. Take some time to figure out what is actually cheaper to buy at Dollar Stores.
3) Shop clearance racks for clothes. Very, very rarely do I walk into a store and pay full price for an item. (in fact, this year, I’m only buying from second-hand stores for myself!) My kids use LOTS of hand-me-downs, but if I know I am running low on something, I go at the end of the season and stock up for the next year. One year in July, I went into Children’s Place and bought several outfits for my daughter for the next summer- all for $1 or $2 a piece.
4) Find out what meat is on sale, then plan your meals. For so long, I would plan my meals (on the weeks I actually got around to planning!) then go to the store. But I have found that by buying meat that is on sale, then planning my menu, this saves tons of money. I don’t have to have ribs this week- I can wait until next week when they’re on sale for $1.59 a pound instead of $3.99 a pound. (mmm ribs!)
5) Learn to live with less! I know this is very basic, but really, do you need another pair of shoes? This is a practice I am trying to instill in my own life. I am a “reforming pack rat”- meaning I have held on to lots of junk over the years but am finally learning to let go. And it is so freeing! But it does absolutely no good if I constantly bring in another armload of stuff every other week. Whether or not-gasp- it was a good deal or not! Here’s a little challenge: try to go one week without buying anything but groceries. It is a fun way (sort of!) to see how addicted we are to buying things.
I hope that you found at least one idea in this post that can help you stay on your budget- and I’d love for you to share your own ideas for saving cash!
Linking up: Living Well Spending Less
About Kelli Hays
Dollar stores are the BEST. We have some dishes and glasses that we bought there that are better quality than what we’ve found in other stores!
We use the dollar store for alot of our cleaning supplies, but when I was in there the other day they had summer clothes for kids at a really good price! It was just about as cheap as going to the Goodwill.