21 Old Fashioned Frugal Living Tips to Try Today (that will save you thousands 💰)

have you ever looked around at other people and thought how come it seems like being Frugal and saving money just like seems to come so easy to them and I have such a hard time saving money I tend to spend in this whole like being Frugal thing is really hard for me it may surprise you to learn that being Frugal or spending extravagantly is actually potentially tied to our genetics so scientists have been researching this it's a whole emerging field of brain study called neuro economics which is basically kind of combining psychology and economics and trying to figure out why people have certain spending habits and others don't why are some people just almost like predisposed to be frugal and others seem to be predisposed to spend more extravagantly lest you think that I am just giving us a pass as to why we can spend extravagantly and not have to worry about it and we don't need to worry about being frugal book as well it's just part of our genetics and I can't help it that's also not so true there are absolutely things just like if you were predisposed to heart disease based on your genetics that doesn't mean that you're going to have a heart attack and that that's just inevitable the choices that we make are going to dictate how that predisposition plays out in our everyday lives so if maybe you feel like you are genetically predisposed to be a spender then it's really great to understand that I love how Psychology and Neuroscience we can tie all of this together to be able to understand our brains so that we can sort of have cheat codes which are habits I mean creating new habits are like creating cheat codes for our brain so that we can work around some of that wiring that's maybe taken us in a Direction that's really not being very helpful for our everyday lives so if you would like to save money if you would like to be more frugal then stick around because I am going to share with you 21 tips pieces of advice from past generations for the wisdom of our grandmothers in how you can save money and be more frugal starting right now number one tip from Grandma is to cook at home I love going out and have someone else cook for me okay it is so nice to not have to be the one responsible for the cooking and the dishes and all of that but we also know that you are going to pay more money for food at a restaurant you then have tip and gas money and all the things that go into it maybe paying for a babysitter so cooking at home is something that our grandmothers did very very often it wasn't super common that they were going out to eat and out to restaurants that was more of a special occasion and I have to say even in my own generation that was more of a special occasion thing it was not a normal regular thing cooking at home can save big number two kind of piggybacks off of that and it is to cook from scratch I am very guilty of this I love like fun new recipes I love cookbooks I love trying things but often a lot of these intricate recipes can call for ingredients that are kind of random almost or pricier Maybe things we don't use regularly so kind of getting back to the basics you know there's a lot out there and I've made content and shared lots of things over the years about meal planning and the benefits of meal planning and different recipes and things but you almost don't even need a meal plan if you are cooking from scratch when we get to that more cooking from scratch and not using so many packaged ingredients that really does help us to save money number three goes along with the other two and I did touch on it a little bit already but that is to use simple recipes again we don't need to overthink this we don't need to over complicate it we don't need to have saffron and like all of this stuff in there you know 65 different ingredients there is something to be said for a really good piece of chicken fried chicken with some butter salt pepper and flour those are not expensive ingredients and boy does it taste delicious and even foods that otherwise might seem like slightly unhealthier are typically healthier when we make them from home number five and this is a favorite of mine is wearing an apron to help save your clothes when you're preparing food I also wear mine when I am cleaning I just I don't know maybe I'm just a messy person our grandmothers were apron Wares and in fact not just our grandmothers a lot of other cultures living today just in other parts of the world wear aprons on the regular it's just kind of part of the cooking and the cleaning process so aprons not only saves your clothing but it kind of I mean for me it acts like a walking dish towel I'll be honest I definitely do a little bit of like drying my hands on the apron and I have a few of them I like to find some kind of fun ones on Etsy I'll link you to some down below that I really like you don't have to go fancy though it can be super basic I have a few different ones I have half aprons full aprons I love my aprons I wear them all the time it keeps your clothes looking newer and Lasting longer it keeps you from staining things or accidentally bleaching something or just you know wearing out your clothes faster number six and this tip is one I can tell you I learned from my own grandmother and it's one that I have instilled in my house from the beginning especially when we first got married we had a lot of little kids and we were very very broke which is we basically drink water and milk for the most part sticking to water and milk and coffee in my case saves me a bunch of money juice my husband and I go through this like little battle all the time if you buy juice it goes like that we have eight children juice disappears in a day having just milk and water be our drinking options have worked really well for us over the years we just don't bring in the sodas and all of that kind of stuff into our house the sodas the juices they just really increase your grocery bill really fast number seven is to make coffee at home now I love a good coffee shop as much as the next gal and I do love myself a good Starbucks especially if I've got a road trip that I'm going on but one of the things that I have noticed is that since we moved out to our farm it's not convenient to get to a Starbucks and I save a lot of money by not regularly going through Starbucks it's it's wild how fast that that adds up so making coffee at home and if you are an espresso lover then I would highly recommend investing in a decent espresso maker I will link ours down below in the description box for you I purchased it as a Christmas gift for my husband two years ago and my husband and my children use it every single day I'm more of a regular coffee gal on the regular I like an espresso As a treat but others in my family like to have an espresso every day we use our espresso maker every single day it is absolutely paid for itself probably in like three months it paid for itself so making coffee at home can save you big number eight is to learn basic baking skills I did not grow up learning to bake I watched my mom bake but I don't know I didn't have a whole lot of interest my mom has so many talents and skills and abilities that I am kicking myself that I didn't ask her to teach me when I was living in her home and I had access to her but baking and things like that are habits and hobbies and skills that I have taught myself okay with the Advent of this wonderful thing called YouTube you can learn almost anything that you want to know you're be hard-pressed to find something that you couldn't learn online these days and the basics of baking that is a skill that's just going to be so helpful and practical to you you know baking is a science whereas cooking is an art that's you've got a little more leeway in cooking to mess things up baking does require you to get things right how however let me just tell you the rewards that you reap from baking are amazing homemade bread sourdough my friend Lisa here from Farmhouse on Boone is I call her the sourdough Queen she has taught me so much about sourdough it's great I love it learning basic baking skills can save your family Big Time number nine is to reuse old jars and containers now if you are an Uber minimalist this might be hard for you because your brain is sort of geared towards like getting rid of things not keeping stuff like that around I will say that there are absolutely certain types of items but I'm like yeah I'm gonna hold on to that that's a good jar you know when you get a good box when something comes to your house and you're like that is a dang good box I'm gonna hold on to that box it sounds ridiculous it goes down the list of adulting things that you're like I never thought someday I would hold on to a box because it was just a great box and here we are saving jars things that you can utilize later for canning or just for storage glass jars with good Lids that stay on those are worth their weight in gold so hang on to those things our grandmas did they reused them I think we all probably have some memory of a Betty Crocker butter dish and our grandma's fridge that you open it up and it's not butter in there it's old chili or whatever so Grandma was constantly saving good containers and reusing them so it's definitely a habit that I think many of us have gotten out of but it's one that is worth getting back into number 10 is to buy in bulk when it makes sense not everything makes sense to buy in bulk if it's something that you just don't use enough it's going to end up taking up valuable space in your home if it's something that can expire it very well may expire before you can use it but buying in bulk on items that you know that you will be able to get through that you know it makes sense for you to do that and obviously you want to do the math and make sure that you're actually saving money on that bulk item because just because it claims to be a bulk item doesn't mean you're actually saving any money so you want to look at that too crunch the numbers quickly bulk purchasing is a great way to save money number 11 is to plant a small garden now I could say a lot about the cost of Gardens and Farms as somebody who inadvertently turned it into an unnecessarily expensive thing in my life you know kind of the joke of like why would I buy that thing for ten dollars when I could go to Hobby Lobby and spend a hundred dollars on the tools and materials that I need to make it it's kind of the same thing with gardening why would I buy a tomato at the grocery store when I could spend fifty dollars on everything to grow myself one tomato well it's about the long term there'll always be some initial investment into getting a garden going but it really doesn't have to be that much and whether you live in an apartment and you have just a patio space outside and you want to just do some containers the green stalks that allow you to plant kind of in an upward and circular area are really great for allowing you to plant some herbs those herbs can get expensive and they go back bad really fast when you buy them at the store so growing your own having some patio Tomatoes I will tell you right now that I don't care how expensive growing your own Tomatoes turns out to be the taste of them is worth not buying them at the grocery store don't get overwhelmed it doesn't need to be grandiose you don't need to grow all the things and everything I really started with focusing on kind of like salsa ingredients because my family loves salsa and we love homemade salsa so I kind of started with like let me grow some jalapenos and some tomatoes and maybe some onions my onions were kind of a fail the first year they didn't work out so well and I grew herbs and flowers so that I could have fresh flowers without paying for flowers so there's lots of things that you can grow on your own it doesn't have to be expensive I'm going to do a video soon to share some of my biggest lessons I've learned in gardening for the last three years now because I kind of had an epiphany this year and it turned everything around so it does not need to be expensive do not get overwhelmed with all the gardening things get you some dirt a little bit of fertilizer go buy you a plant start at Lowe's or Home Depot you don't have to be growing of sowing seeds and doing all that if you don't want to you can start with the plants start with seeds but get yourself growing a few things and in the long run you will save yourself money which brings us to number 12 which is to consider preserving Foods consider learning how to can things now I personally don't recommend just canning anything and everything that can be canned okay there's a lot of helpful content out here on YouTube about canning and preserving I have learned that I have to be really brutally honest about like what my family will actually eat otherwise it just takes up my time and space in our home so I like to stick to canning and I would recommend starting by canning things that you know for sure your family will eat and making sure that you've got the proper place to store them another way that we can and preserve is doing egg glassing this has been so helpful for us because our chickens are very prolific egg layers and even though we are a family of 10 we cannot eat the amount of ticket the amount of chickens they don't lay chickens well they do but it's an egg the amount of eggs that they lay we cannot eat so what happens though with chickens is that they lay a bunch of eggs in like the spring summer and then as it gets colder the number of eggs they lay kind of tapers off and as they get older the number of eggs they lay tapers off so you can water glass eggs which gives those eggs a longer shelf life about 18 months you know give or take and it really extends your egg laying season so that you can start water glassing eggs that your chickens were laying in the summer and you can be eating those in the winter number 13 I'm a big proponent of which is DIY home projects home renovation in general is very very expensive it should say something that it's almost more expensive to do additions to homes and Renovations of homes than it is to build just a new home from the ground up it's kind of crazy so obviously contractors have Specialties and they get paid because they are specialists in that area but there are many things that people fear that they cannot do and so they just are like no I'm not going to do that I'm going to pay somebody else to do that but you can save a lot of money by doing DIY projects and once again I will tell you that if I can do it you can do it my husband and I have taught ourselves over the last five years to do a lot of things and this is coming from two people who couldn't have you know put together a level table from Ikea hardly the first 10 years of our marriage my husband had absolutely no like building construction skills whatsoever and now he has built me a beautiful like pergola and fencing and all kinds of things that we have been able to do together we each bring our own skill set to the table diying our home projects has saved us thousands of dollars now there are certain things that we're not comfortable diying like electrical work for example those we tend to leave to The Experts the project might take you a little bit longer but you're going to save a ton of money and when it's all said and done you are going to have this very tangible proof of what you are capable of and it will give you the courage and the motivation to say yes to the next DIY project knowing that you are more than capable of figuring it out and doing it number 14 and that is being willing to buy off Brands some people are very brand loyal I mean the marketing gurus of the world have worked very hard to create products and marketing around products that make people brand loyal it's not that you know there's anything wrong necessarily with being brand loyal but it can cost you money because the truth is is a lot of off brands are the exact same product often made in the exact same Factory the exact same place just a different label slapped on it so it's kind of shocking when you dig into that and there are obviously some products for which buying the brand name is a better product or at least it tastes like it's supposed to but there's a lot of products that are not weird they are the exact same thing and it can save you a bunch of money to be willing to buy off-brand on those products number 15 and this comes back to my own mother once again mom help is to learn basic sewing skills the ability to hem your own garments whether that's dresses or pants hemming curtains things like that my mother has taught me some Basics going skills since I became an adult she did teach me some quilting things but it's been a long time since I've used those skills and it's very likely that I have forgotten them however basic sewing skills once again are things that you can self-teach through video content online that is totally free to you and those are skills that are going to save you because not only Can You Mend items so that you know clothing items you can mend them so they can last longer curtains and bedding and things like that you know you can tailor things to make them fit you like a glove it's just the skill of being able to sew is so so handy and that's one that I certainly would love to improve number 16 is to set up a laundry line a place to dry your clothing outside instead of using your dryer I actually recently I've been begging my husband to build me a clothesline outside so that I could do this because I love the way clothes that have been dried in the sun I love the way that they smell brings the brightness back to clothing the sun is a great way to dry your clothing and not only can It save you money in the horrible heat waves that we're having right now can make take it so that your house doesn't get so hot either if you are not running that dryer all the time so a clothesline not expensive I actually just purchased I will link it down below in the description box a gorilla line it really holds a lot of weight and it kind of sets up the structure of the clothesline very simply for you so you just draw it across and hook it on it's neat and a great way to set up a clothesline without having to construct and build a bunch of stuff number 17 of course you won't be surprised another great Frugal tip is to declutter and get rid of things that you don't need and what you don't use because often times at least I have found that if I'm not doing a good job staying on top of my decluttering regimen and going through things and getting rid of things there's 10 people lots of people are bringing things into my house all the time so if I don't stay on top of it then often I will waste money because I will buy something that I think I don't have but it's just that I can't find it because it's buried somewhere under a bunch of crap and so I will purchase that thing again believing that I don't already own it when in fact I do so decluttering while on its face may not seem like that's actually saving you any money because you're just getting rid of stuff their actual practical ways that decluttering being better organized with things that you do have can save you money number 18 and this is one that I feel like it's kind of gone out of fashion so our grandparents did this for sure but I feel like you just don't see it as often these days and that is swapping with other people or bartering things trading of services I do think in a lot of creative Industries you see this a lot I certainly know as a photographer I did some swapping and trading with people in other creative Industries in my area at the time trading and bartering Services skills that you have is a great way to save money and of course that requires you to have a skill worth swapping and bartering but there is also things that you can barter and trade you kind of have to know how and where to do that one great place is the free you know pay nothing Facebook pages where you can just put things up that you just want to get rid of and people can come and get them but it's a great place for you if you need something in your home if there's something you need to purchase before you run out and buy that thing brand new you might check some of those barter and free pages to see if someone else maybe needs to get rid of that very same thing number 19 is buying second-hand clothing now I have talked about this ad nauseam over the years but I do love some really good secondhand clothing thrifting is a great way to be able to purchase really quality items at a much more affordable price or a discounted price now of course affordability is in the eye of the beholder but I love shopping at thredup this video is not sponsored by them I've worked with them many times over the years so and I absolutely love thredup it's my favorite way to find some of the pricier brands that I like to wear some of the clothing that over the years I found that brand just fits me really well the clothing holds up really well I can go and search for those Brands by my size on thredup and find some really great secondhand clothing which brings me to number 20 kind of plays off number 19 and that is when you do purchase things whether it's new or used invest in quality pieces things that will last my husband and I have learned this the hard way especially when it comes to Furniture in our home we tend to gasp at some of the prices of the Quality Furniture and we end up just buying cheaper things and they just get destroyed between our kids and our pets they just can't hang they can't hold up and I have absolutely seen that furniture pieces that were passed down to me from my grandmother and my mother are pieces that absolutely are like still going strong so I tend to resist now in purchasing something until I can afford to purchase the quality piece that I really want that I really love and that I know is going to hold up which is also why side note I love like refinishing Furniture because you can go to consignment stores and thrift stores and find great pieces of furniture and if it's like a tone of wood that's not your style not your vibe in your home painting it refinishing it it's a great way to give it new life make it fit but you're getting that quality construction that is really hard to find these days and number 21 this tip maybe Isn't So Much from Grandma it might be a little bit more from me but it's something that I have come to realize it's so important in my own life and probably in yours too because I don't know anybody who does this naturally and that is to focus on the gain and not the Gap in your life there's a whole book about this called the gain in the Gap It's a Wonderful book I'll link it down below if you'd like to read it or listen to it on Audible but the idea here is that when you are trying to save money and you're looking back at you know your journey to be more frugal and perhaps you feel like you're failing focusing on the gain how far you've come the habits that you have been able to create is so valuable instead of focusing on the Gap how far you have to go how much more you still want to save how bad you still are at being extravagant in this way or or being a spender in that way if you continue to focus on the gap between where you are now and where you want to be that is a moving Horizon it will always change with your goals with your life as your life evolves and changes that sort of end point it's going to keep moving that goal post just keeps moving and so you will always be living in that Gap that feeling of I'm not enough I'm not doing enough instead of living in the gain and being able to look back at how far you've come live in the moment let yourself be proud of yourself for the achievements that you have made and focus on that that's going to put you in a posture of like I can do this okay I've done this I can do this and you keep moving forward instead of always feeling like but I didn't do that we don't want to focus on that we want to focus on how far we've come not how far we still have to go [Music] let's make this love last till Valentine's let's spend this night together let this fire burn

Channel: Angela Braniff

Views: 456,096

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Id: xYw2x7Rq530

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023