27 Non-Obvious Frugal Living Hacks to SAVE OVER $1,000/month

so every time I've done a video in this series of how I saved money in this month I have limited myself to nine money saving strategies well this month I have a treat for you my friends I challenged myself to save every single day of the month for the entire month of January got sick at the end I got 27 tips for you instead of 31 but hopefully you'll forgive me so let's get started starting on January 1st we had a party at my house to celebrate the new year and instead of ordering Domino's Pizza which would have been easier we decided to do a homemade baked potato bar if we had ordered three pizzas from dominoes it would have been $21 instead we spent $9 most of that coming from bacon because I really wanted bacon on the baked potatoes Savings of $112 next I had my semiannual rag making party in which we took all of the t-shirts that have fully outlived their usefulness in this household and we sliced them all up so I had three t-shirts that that equals 42 Rags they will last me roughly six months before they are so groy I don't want to use them anymore I estimate that those 42 shirts will be the equivalent of about 100 sheets of paper towels which around here 100 sheets of paper towels will cost you around $25 so over the course of the 6 months those three old t-shirts cut up into Rags will save me $53.3 I bet you didn't know your old shirts with holes in the armpits could be worth so much did you next this one is a pro tip to all the M out there put two fenter authentication on any device that your child ever has access to to which could potentially be used to buy a product I uh I didn't think my four and three-year-olds were able to do this apparently between episodes of Paw Patrol that we've purchased they will now show an ad saying do you want to be a Paramount plus member for $111.99 a month and all your little three-year-old has to do is Click yes and if you don't have two Factor authentication enabled you are going to be charged about $12 because your toddler can press one button so two fact Factor authentication means that no purchases can be made unless I put in a password from my phone not the TV be smart out there people next I have changed my mind about something I said in a previous video I said that I don't do house plants it's just not worth it however I I have discovered a plant that can survive anything including 6 months of neglect in my compost pile because I thought it was dead it wasn't and so now I have propagated it and I've covered my house with a bunch of little clippings and it's making my house very nice and green in the middle of this cold and snowy January here in Maine so if I had bought all of those myself it probably would have been about $20 worth of plants and that's estimating conservatively but instead I got them all full free which is always nice next I filled out a class action lawsuit which I typically do a couple times a year this one was for Verizon I'll leave I'll leave the link in the description if you're interested to see if you also qualify it's guaranteed $15 with a potential of earning $100 so I'm just going to estimate that I saved $15 by doing this class auction lawsuit uh but maybe it'll be more six we use our local libraries multiple libraries two to three times a week currently they're both running winter reading programs I'm not going to be able to estimate how much I save because we go to the library because it's a free place for me to take my kids and hang out for the education that I'm providing them by reading to them a bazillion books a week for um socialization opportunities and all of the other activities that they provide and getting to see the guinea p PS my kids love to see the guinea pigs twice a week but I will estimate if we complete both the winter reading programs at both libraries we have access to we're probably going to get about $40 in free stuff from books to stickers and whatever because I've got a bunch of kids and they all can win things next this one technically isn't something I did but I'm going to take credit for it and tell you about it because you know we're all about saving money here this one was my husband's doing he has been using disposable razors for a long long time now and he recently said I am sick of it I'm going to get a safety razor that has like the Disposable blades they are orders of magnitude cheaper than disposable razors I had no idea the razor itself is going to pay for itself 3 months of use and we're going to be saving $14.20 a month on razors which is pretty cool next I had some milk that was about to go bad and I didn't want it to go bad and there was no way we were going to be able to drink all of this milk before it went bad so I went over and I checked out the YouTube channel of Jennifer merch who talks about cheese making and I learned how to make ricotta which was amazing saved me about $248 worth of milk that I didn't have to throw out next this one is definitely particular to my family I'm not sure if you're the same way but we like lots of budget categories we like to get nitty-gritty and very detailed in the way we view how we're spending our money and this month we got even more nitty-gritty in one category so we had this category that was like household spending but in that category we were kind of tracking both Essentials and non-essentials and sometimes we would run into trouble trouble like that's the category we would buy diapers from and maybe if there was some non-essential spending that happened that month and then all of a sudden it's the end of the month and we have to buy diapers and so we decided we're going to get a little bit more nitty-gritty and we'll say okay here's non-essential household spending and here's essential household spending and that way we're never going to accidentally run out of money uh because we were having fun when I say it like that I don't think most people are going to think that's saving money but it is going to save us probably about 20 bucks a month here's something we can all agree on though laundry detergent can be expensive but it really doesn't have to be but despite having this video that has done really well a lot of people have responded very positively to it despite my laundry video I still haven't actually been measuring two tablespoons every time I do laundry I just kind of eyeball it and say looks good so this month I actually started measuring 2 tbspoon of laundry detergent per load of laundry I haven't noticed a difference in the cleanliness it's everything is just as clean but uh it is about half when I did the measure like I measure them against each other two tablespoons versus like the one line on the cup that the detergent Manu manufacturer provid you 2 tspoons is about half of the lowest amount that they're measuring for you you really need so much less detergent than you think you do and if you're going through gobs and gobs and gobs of laundry detergent either you have uh like 12 children who all play sports and like to play in the mud or you might be using a little too much laundry detergent for me though because I was already doing roughly about the one line it's only going to save me about $150 a month on laundry detergent cutting that in half because we do about 15 loads of laundry a month which is a topic for another video I can talk about if people are interested because a lot of people I see do like one to two loads of laundry a day but I can talk about that if people are interested another one people always like to talk about oh if you want to save money you just just got to make your coffee at home well how much does that actually save you well mentioned that my husband really enjoys like the science of brewing his coffee and he likes tinkering with it making it perfect so we order whole bean coffee that are like roasted the day before from this coffee subscription online when I do the math for how much it costs to purchase 2 lbs of coffee it ends up being about 64 cents per cup of coffee if we were to go to Dunkin Donuts it costs $264 for a small cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts bananas so that is $2 cheaper per cup of coffee when we use the happy mug beans if we were to use like generic grocery store coffee uh it ends up being about 41 cents a cup of coffee my husband and I always have a cup of coffee in the morning probably half the time will each have a cup of coffee in the afternoon as well if you do all that averaged out so like so like two and a half cups of coffee on average a day for the entire month of January that's $190 in savings just on coffee and that's not fancy coffee either that's not like a mocha frail latte straight black coffee $190 cheaper to make it at home next if you are new around here I have three kids and kids like novelty and you can provide them novelty by going to the grocery store and getting toys all the time but you can also provide novelty by using a little bit of creativity and recently we noticed that the tiles on the kitchen floor look a lot like Hopscotch so we took some masking tape out and we made ourselves a hopscotch thing and if I could very conservatively estimate that one moment of creativity saved me about $5 to get a new knickknack at the grocery store for a toy say five bucks save there on January 13th I batched some errands instead of I had a lot of errands to do that day and instead of doing each one one at a time which sometimes I think to do especially if I've got like a napping baby I want to like Stak while the ey's hot and just get whatever done in that stretch of time that I can this time I decided to batch them all alog together so I would have been driving 10 and 1/2 miles instead I only drove six about $1.50 worth of savings and then I did that about three more times over the course of the month so we're going to say I saved $6 in gas by batching some errands next I can't remember if I've mentioned this before but I exclusively drink from a water bottle like I'm I take my water bottle to the dinner table and it's a walks around the house with me and I don't drink if I'm not using this water bottle well unfortunately my Walmart water bottle from about 6 months ago met an untimely end at the hand of one of my toddlers And so this time I decided I was going to get again a buy it for life product something that I could buy once and would hopefully just never need to be replaced or as close to never as possible with entropy so I did a lot of research and I decided on Hydro Flask apparently this was like the hot brand like four years ago which is about on par with my speed of catching on the trends but this one had a big old Dent of the person who bought it returned it and Amazon decided to try selling it again at a deeply discounted rate at which I bought it so I saved $20 on hopefully a buy it for Life water bottle and I was more than happy to pay that to never need to buy a new water bottle again if you if you weren't aware I think it is return Season on Amazon everyone who got a bunch of junk they didn't want from Christmas or holiday seasons is now trying to return it and things are being relisted online and you can get some good deals if you're willing to buy used all right halfway through the month I was trying to come up with projects that I could do so that I could save money on that day and I realized I have a box of like things that I could mend I probably look at that box once a year I'm not uh I'm not very faithful to the idea of mending all of my clothes when that when the mood strikes me I'll do it but it's not like I have a good routine of it however when I looked in my uh things that I can mend box I realized that there were two items in there that I actually was thinking of purchasing that knew that I had need of uh that were kind of expensive um if you're if you've ever nursed a baby some of the supplies that come with that can get expensive and so I mended two of my straps that needed that needed just a little bit of mending that just needed a few minutes of attention they held and now I don't have to buy new ones and those can be really expensive so I'm going to say that I saved $100 by mending the two of those all right next my husband and I at during this Christmas season looked at each other and we're like you know we haven't bought Christmas decor since we were engaged and we bought that one really old Christmas tree that's the only Christmas decor we've ever bought and when we looked at each other this year and we're like you know what it would be kind of nice to make the house feel a little more christmy maybe we should do that and we thought about it and we're like you know what why don't we just wait till next year my husband being the smarty pants he is he went to Walmart and noticed that all the Christmas decor is 75% off in January so we got a few things got got a new tree that has lights that work got garland that choice to get our Christmas decor in January instead of this past December or next November December uh saved us $93.50 so pretty pretty good deal day 17 I fixed a trash can trash cans were actually pretty expensive uh this one had the little foot pedal that just would not stay on my husband and I were already talking about like yeah you know we've had it a few years maybe it's just the end of its life and I'm like uh I don't think so so I grabb some duct tape and now we have a fixed trash can that's continuing to function here's an interesting one I thought this was a way better Money Saver uh than it turned out to be but I'll tell you the whole story I noticed that we have two lights on our garage that just stay on all the time and I realized oh if I turn those off well that's saving some money I went to my electric bill to see you know how much money that was going to save me and I did the math based on okay two 120 W bulbs and I was like wow honey if we just turn these two lights off we save $22 a month and he looks at me like that's not right how can that be right and so we we looked at it a little closer and we realized that because we have LED light bulbs they are not using 120 watts between the two lights they're only using like 9 Watts so I'm saving $342 but this is a lesson to all of you out there who still haven't switched every one of your light bulbs to LED there's a reason the idea that whenever you leave a room you should shut the light off is much more impactful if you have incandescent lights but still turn your lights off if you've got them and you're not using them I also made a lot of bread this month I like I do that every month but this month my husband has decided he likes my homemade bread as much as he likes the Ezekiel bread that we've been getting for a while that's you know quite healthy for you and so uh we made a deal we're like all right I'm going to make sure that I'm making bread all the time and we'll just not have to purchase the Ezekiel Bread anymore and so that's going to be a savings of probably $17.78 a month here is the smartest thing I did all month I was like looking around at all of my friends and all of their children and everyone is dropping like flies from colds and flues and Co and whatnot and I thought you know what it is a fact that at some point in the near future during this winter season we're eventually going to get sick I should probably have some freezer meals put away just in case that happens and so I went and I made giant batch of meatballs meatballs are great if you've got little kids because you could just take a couple out of the freezer like two or three put them on a plate and that keeps that there you go that's all they want is two or three meatballs so I went out and I made like 4 lbs of ground beef into meatballs um I'm estimating that you know that's if we actually had full meals there would probably be about four meals like four big meals worth of meatballs if we deci if I said that when we were sick we would need to spend about $15 to eat out as a family which come on is $3 a person in in my family which you can't even do but let's just be super conservative if I had four meals $15 a person I'm going to say making my giant mess of Meatballs just in case we got sick saved me $60 that's foreshadowing here's kind of a dumb one but I figured I should mention it because I still see people commenting that oh my gosh if you have potatoes with eyes you need to throw them out they're dangerous they're toxic potatoes with eyes are not toxic if you eat a very very green potato there's some amount of toxic and that but the eye of the potato is you just got to scoop it out and the rest of the potato is good so I just wanted to let you all know in case you didn't I had an entire couple pounds of potatoes that started to sprout eyes on me so I plucked them all out and baked a big mess of I don't remember what we did with them we do French baked french fries or mashed potatoes I don't remember what we did and that saved me a125 here's another one for all of you who have babies in your lives uh baby food is ridiculously expensive I mean baby food goes from like5 6 $7 a pound for like puree carrots which are like you can get for 80 cents a pound if you just got the whole carrot you don't do like serve the baby a serving of food from a a pouch or a container it just doesn't make any sense also it takes more time and my kid is hungry like the baby eats as much as the big kids you know even if I were to estimate just getting like one jar of baby food a day that's going to be like A110 on the low end it can easily go up to like $2 like for one container per day over the course of 31 days that would have cost $341 sometimes we get like snacky baby foods mostly As like entertainment like the like teething biscuits or things like that that's like if I'm not giving it to you for principal nutrition kiddo this is to keep you entertained while I finish making dinner that's so even if I take out the the times we do buy little snacks in the month I saved $321 by giving my kid things like banana oh my gosh my kid eat so much banana squash carrot beans he he really liked refried beans the other day when we gave him refried beans hummus real food not baby food here's another cool one I mentioned the library but I got to say something else about the library libraries in this area at least and I think a lot of other areas also offer tickets to local museums and attractions so we snagged the group pass from our library they offer it to one family a day the day before I called them like hey has anybody nabbed tomorrow's ticket to the children's museum they said no it's yours uh so we saved $80 on tickets to the Children's Museum and my kids love going all right toward the end of the month I started getting real desperate and I thought about okay what what else am I doing in my life that means I'm not spending money how else can I show that we save by the way we live so day 24 I was like hey you know what we don't have a gym membership we Chase children around the house we go on walks and you know sometimes if I've got like a baby strapped in the baby carrier plus some push on the double stroller that is a good workout my friends uh there's also YouTube which has like H whatever you could possibly want for for workouts so even if I found the cheapest like uh Planet Fitness gym around here that's $15 a month you save here's an interesting one I you know as I mentioned earlier I bake bread at home it's really fun for me I noticed though that the yeast at the grocery store that I thought I was buying in bulk cuz I I don't buy the tiny individual packets I buy like a little jar of it I thought oh well that's that's still better in terms of price and I I looked it up I'm like oh my gosh it's kind of not so then I decided oh maybe I should check Amazon and see and I'm like oh my gosh I have been so silly so I will leave the link to you in the description because Amazon yeast goes for $4.50 a pound compared to grocery store yeast which is for $25.40 cents a pound so I saved $20.90 by buying yeast in big bulk which is great cuz I'm going to go through it and I leave yeast in my freezer because it stores better that way and it'll live longer in my freezer and yeeha never have to worry about running out of yeast so I can make all the bread I want second to the last or the illness descended upon the household we did we did one of our uh I I went to the thrift store that's in town I if you were part of the live stream I did on the Black Friday first of all thank you that was a lot of fun but I was mentioning on that live stream that I was looking for blackout curtains because I had made the unfortunate mistake of washing my previous blackout curtains for our room and apparently you shouldn't do that they disintegrate and fall apart if you bought them at Walmart so curtains aren't something you need to survive I wasn't willing to like use the emergency fund to get whatever blackout curtains I wanted for a bedroom I was willing to wait um and so wait we did and we so about 2 months later when I was at the thrift store I finally was like they had like a set of six or eight matching blackout curtains or or very very heavy duty curtains that weren't technically Blackout um I was like I jumped on it exactly why I have my to hunt for list so that I can be thinking about the items that I'm currently needing when even if they're not on the top of my mind they are on the top of my list and so I didn't forget blackup carts at the thrift store and when I got home I realized that they were like $40 a panel curtains if I had bought them brand new and I got them for $5 a panel so buying them all saved $210 and finally I was doing a pantry challenge in the month of January before I caught the plague the one argument I hear people making frequently against Pantry challenges is like why would you buy all kinds of extra stuff in bulk and whatever just so you can spend a little bit less one month and then the next month you're just going to go out and buy everything in bulk again here here is where the magic happens because it's not working the way you think it does you're not going out and buying everything in bulk all throughout the year just to have things in bulk in the system that I use the only time that I'm making extra purchases about food that I'm not going to use immediately that week is if it's on super sale if it's a loss leader sale if it's a markdown sale I talked about all of these in my last video on how to save money on groceries which I'll share with you in a second but let me finish my point you're only buying things when they're on super sale and you can't ever find them at that price otherwise so eventually if you're doing this correctly you will eventually have a bit of a stockpile but I will never blow my budget just to get things on super duper sale everything I purchase still has to come within my guidelines which if you're interested in how we do like spending guidelines in my house I can make a video on that too if anyone's interested when I do a pantry challenge my goal is to start whittling down some of the bulk that we've accumulated when purchasing things on super sale and so you know you have to use food if you're going to bring it in your house you have to use it I was doing great on my pantry challenge I was like spending basically 50% of my usual weekly grocery budget and then I got sick my husband took over grocery shopping I came down feeling like death one morning and he's like just so you know I did all the grocery shopping and I made all the meal plans for you and you know it's all on and I think I started weeping he didn't know I was doing a spending challenge like I don't I want him to do the spending challenge I wanted to lay on the couch and not throw up he took care of us and so half of the month of January I did a spending Challenge and even then just those two weeks compared to what I normally would spend in a week of grocery shopping I saved $114.2 in two weeks on groceries and I already spend a really really low amount if you didn't know we spend like 60% of what the USDA thinks the Thrifty budget should be so it's it's already low but I slashed it even by like 50% during a pant challenge which is not too sh chabby for grand total $1,393 not bad for a month of savings how did you do this month if you've been doing any savings challenges during the month of January I'd love to hear about it if you want to see that video I mentioned about grocery shopping on a budget and how you can save probably like at least $500 in one month uh you can check that video out and I will see you over there so bye YouTube

Channel: Homegrown Hillary

Views: 87,700

Keywords: Extreme frugal living tips, Frugal, Frugal mom, How to save $1000, How to save $1000 in a month, Saving money, frugal habits, frugal hacks, frugal living, frugal living habits, frugal living hacks, frugal living ideas, frugal living tips, frugal living tips and ideas, frugal tips, frugality, how to be frugal, how to save money, money saving tips, save money, saving money tips

Id: H1ozU9YhpgE

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024