35 Frugal Choices That Saved Us Money This Week

saving money is really about dozens of small choices that you make every single week that add up to saving major amounts of money let's take an inside look at a week in the life of a frugal family 35 choices we made this week that saved us money [Music] you know making big fixes rarely ever works when it comes to saving money it's actually a lot of small little minuscule moves that add up to a large amount of savings as we mentioned we're going to share with you 35 frugal choices we made this week that saved us money but we want you to stick with us because then we are going to share four non-frugal choices that we made this week and we're going to tell you whether we actually regret them or not let's get started first frugal thing that we did this week by the way before we get into our subject matter if you don't know us and you're new to the channel i'm larry and i'm holly and we're from under the median where every week we talk about frugal living all right now the first thing we did that saved us money was we went to the library and we borrowed books thank you to prepper princess she mentioned this book i was kind of just a comment in passing she mentioned it on one of her videos last week i'm like ooh that sounds interesting it's called the moneyless man a year of freakonomic living it's mark boyle by the way is the author just in case you want to know tell us in the comment section have any of you read this book so basically the guy decided he was going to live for one year spending absolutely no money first of all i'm fascinated to find out how he did that and secondly i'm really sort of looking forward to maybe picking up some new ideas that i actually haven't thought through before so let me know you guys read the book that that's the ultimate money-saving plan is to not spend anything i don't think i could do that i just don't think i i i enjoy buying things and i don't think i could do that for all year could you go a year without spending money tell us that in the comments section do you think how long have you gone without actually spending money it's an interesting idea seriously if it means writing a book and making a lot of money on that i guess we're good we can do it we can do anything if you set your mind to it right all right second thing we did that saved us money second thing that we did to save money is we borrowed movies from the library maybe there's some doctor who fans out there i remember when our local public television station used to put the old shows on the air i've been writing either my electric bike or my 10 speed to work for the last two weeks i have not my car has been sitting in the garage all that time and not only do i ride the electric bike to work i solar charge it using our opus power station that i've been charging out in the backyard with the sun so it's not costing any money a couple of months ago when we actually got the electric bike we promised we would tell you like what impact that like in real life had on our gas bills our gas bills had been running pretty close between a 90 and a hundred dollars a month by riding his bicycle consistently the electric bike or the 10 speed back and forth to work we cut 50 a month off of our gas bill that's right we cut it in half another thing we do to save gas is that we use gas buddy to find the cheapest gas stations in town to buy from now if you want to know 48 more ways that you can kind of take the pain out of the pump and filling up your car with gasoline we did a video on it i'll make sure it's linked up above and in the description of the video we combined all of our trips in order to save as much gas as possible we dehydrated zucchini a friend gave us a lot of zucchini i sliced it put it in the dehydrator and here it is we dried our laundry using the opus 1800 watt power station normally we would like to line dry things but at this particular moment in time it was raining so we used that and then i also got that out in the backyard afterwards and recharged it with the solar panels so really it cost us nothing to dry that laundry because we were using solar power to charge the opus and then the opus in order to run the dryer to dry the laundry this next tip is one of our new favorite things to do we really really have been enjoying this so at night while we're sitting in reading or whatever we're doing relaxing i've been using these usb powered light bulbs to read by and all i have to do is hook it up to a power bank hang this pretty close to us that puts out five watts it's pretty bright and it's certainly enough light that we can use in the evenings save a little money on our electricity we have a pair of these lights we've been using them consistently to light our family room up at night the next four tips actually have to do with food first of all i created a perishable food inventory toward the end of the week on thursday or friday i always inventory everything that is perishable and then i create a menu plan to use up that food we had two clean out the fridge meal nights this week we had a lot of leftover food in the refrigerator so to make sure it didn't go bad we had meals that were just designated as clean out the fridge night and then i also used all of my scraps that i had in the freezer and made some homemade veggie broth we raised our thermostat three degrees for our air conditioning we had it set at 76 degrees and we raised it to 79 and we'll get into more detail as to why we did that more cooking choices we made we made the choice not to use our electric stove all week long we've noticed in our energy usage the minute we turn that electric stove on boy it just skyrockets that electric usage so we've tried to be really creative tell us in the comments section especially during the summer months are you getting super creative in which kitchen appliances you choose to use that aren't going to use a lot of energy and aren't going to heat up your house for us that's definitely the next tip we tried to make as many meals as possible using our pressure cooker instant pot or using the crock pots if you're wondering about the energy use of various appliances in your kitchen i actually created a chart that shows i think it's about ton of the most common kitchen appliances and compares the electric usage of each of those appliances you're interested in getting your own copy of that chart you can have a copy of our kitchen electric usage charts and also all of our menu planning worksheets and charts there's a link to get those in the description of the video hope tracked our expenses super important to do and sometimes we just get behind or we forget to do it but as we've mentioned before it's amazingly difficult four or five days after you purchase some things to remember what in the world you even spent that money on best thing to do stack all your receipts in one specific place at the end of the day and make sure that you're tracking them every single day while you've got the receipts handy the next thing you can do is enter all of your receipts into fetch which i also did this week by the way if you want fetch and don't have it there's a link in the description of this video that you can grab fetch to save a little bit more money we made sun tea out in the backyard you take a gallon jar a recycled pickle jar and put some water in it and what about five tea bags more than that more than that tell us how many tea bags you put in your gallon jar i'd love to know we put like 11 in a gallon of jar so i don't know many maybe some of you're going to tell me i'm using too many big tea bags just regular sized tea bags in my sun tea but i don't think so we recently purchased a dehumidifier for the basement because we were noticing some extra humidity down here so we found out that that uses quite a bit of power when that's actually running it's running at about 549 watts so i turned up the settings on the dehumidifier so it's not dehumidifying down to 35 percent we set it at 50 now these changes as you've maybe noticed as we've gone through all of these choices we made this is just one week worth of choices and you'll notice a couple of things none of these choices is going to save you buku bucks all right remember frugality is always about like a dozen changes every day that are going to save you a little bit of money but over time they really do add up the other thing you'll notice is that some of these changes definitely have to do with our electric bill like raising the thermostat on the ac by three degrees and changing the humidifier setting so that it doesn't cycle on and off as often both of those were born out of the fact that we just recently received our most recent electric bill and holy moly any of the rest of you feeling our pain tell us in the comments section my word i have never ever ever seen a number that high on one of our energy bills so we got to work and that is the next frugal choice that we made we went to our online account for our energy provider they allow us to see our usage not only on a daily basis but also on an hourly basis we can go down to quarter hour increments if we really really want to to see our energy usage so we're going to show you a chart this chart shows in the brighter blue color that is the usage for saturday the 23rd of july and you will notice the average usage was about 2.3 kilowatts per hour on that chart right next to it and the much deeper kind of like almost a brown color that is the energy usage from just five days later that energy usage the overall average usage you'll see that straight line there in that same darker color substantially less than it was just five days earlier and we just wanted to show you this is the power of making just two changes literally that's all we did we raised the ac by three degrees and we made it so that dehumidifier was cycling on and off far less often those are the two major changes that we made in those five days they they will allow us to see a projected bill and i have looked at that projected bill and is down about 30 already for the month i want to add something in about the dehumidifier that i discovered about it not only did we turn it up in terms of how much it's pulling out of the air i also was shutting it off for about eight hours a day and giving it a rest what i noticed was when i turned it back on and used it it's accumulating water much faster when i was running it 24 7 it was still running that refrigerator part that it that causes the 550 some odd watts usage it wasn't pulling as much water out of the air by shutting it off and letting that build up a little bit then it's pulling it out faster so it's actually more efficient to shut it off for about eight hours a day as well as turning it up to 50 we're gonna get right back to the frugal choices we made this week but we do want to encourage you that if you're finding this helpful guys you can really help us by giving this video a thumbs up the next frugal choice we made this week that saved us money is we paid our bills through electronic banking we have a account set up where we can have our credit union actually pay the bills that saves a stamp for each of those bills and it saves our checks so we're not writing checks out they actually send an electronic check to the places that those are going to the next thing we did that actually is directly related to our banking is that we checked our online bank account how does that save us money yes granted it just tells us how much money is actually in the account but while we're on there we checked a couple of other things we checked to make sure that there weren't any purchases that were made that were purchases that we didn't make super important in this day and age to check your electronic bank accounts at least once a week maybe even more than that and the second thing we were able to do is look at the choices the spending choices yes they're there in black and white votes that we had made this week and really ask ourselves if we needed to spend that money always keeping tabs on where your money is at and where it went is really important in frugality and in saving money in the long term we called our insurance company to get new rate quotes we just got we just got the bill for our yearly uh home and auto insurance and it went up substantially so we are shopping new rates we closed our curtains during the daytime to keep out unwanted heat now in relation to that one of the nights the temperature dropped way down along with the humidity so we shut the air conditioning off opened up the windows upstairs and let that air come in we ate plant-based meals i know we do this every week but we felt it worth mentioning because eating plant-based really does help us to lower our grocery bills we ate free bagels and other bread products that our son dan brought home from his work they get some dropped off and they allow him to take home one for each work shift so we were treated there a couple times this week and that is one of my favorite things about his job we had our kids over for taco night and family game night how did this help us save money because tacos are incredibly inexpensive to feed to a crowd we went to a free antique car show and of course i enjoy a good antique car show we saw some really cool cars some of them from the 30s now related to the antique car show one of the things we spent money on that was not frugal is related to that actual day trip so make sure you stick with us because after we're done telling you 35 ways we really saved money this week remember we're gonna give you four ways that we're not frugal at all that we spent money this week and tell you did we regret doing those things we used our opus power station to operate the coffee maker in fact i just read it this morning off of that we're using them more and more just to take some of the dent off of the electric bill hope noticed in the bill that it would spike in the morning when i turned that coffee maker on so we're starting to use that more and remember you can use those for more than just emergencies they can help you save on your electric bill if you're solar charging it and then running high draw items off of those to save that punch out of that electric bill we've mentioned multiple times on the channel how excited we are about the opus portable power stations and just in case you want to take a closer look there'll be a link to any of the products including the opus that we mentioned they'll be listed in the description of the video i took a lunch to work every day you know i just don't go out to eat when i'm working so that does save a lot of money hope always has some leftover soup or something really delicious in the refrigerator so i pack it up put it in my bike bag and wheel it off to work every day another thing that we did yesterday we had to take a road trip and to save a little bit of money on gas since it was cooler yesterday we left the air conditioning off rolled down the windows and i only drove the car 58 miles per hour and that was in a 65 zone and in a 70 mile per hour zone it wasn't a real heavily traveled road so we weren't really backing up any traffic by doing that the car which happens to be a prius ended up getting 58 miles per gallon for about a 360 mile total trip so it was certainly worth taking those two measures to save some money on gas next frugal choice we made we made air popped popcorn as a snack every day i sold three items that we no longer needed and we made 160 on those the question in everybody's mind is what are the four non-frugal choices that we made this week yes we do sometimes make some choices that absolutely by no stretch of the imagination could they be considered frugal we're going to tell you four choices we made this week and whether we absolutely regret making those choices the first kind of non-frugal choice we made i bought pre-shredded lettuce yes i did for our taco bar normally i would never do that but i was tired y'all i had a busy week and i paid the dollar 58 for the little i don't think it was eight ounces but like six ounces of shredded um lettuce that was from aldi the other thing i bought from aldi for our taco night with the kids is we did buy some vegan cheese seldom do we buy any processed vegan products but we did for the family game night and i kind of don't regret it when we took the day trip to a local historical community called bishop hill we bought some premium coffee and these were 35 for these two coffees but they're darn well worth it and we only do that about once a year while we were at the antique car show all of a sudden everybody in the family was absolutely starving so we got in the car and took a trip to burger king to buy impossible burgers at burger king we fed the whole family yes it was 50 bucks at burger king and we had zero coupons with us hope and i bought some tickets to a community theater we had a guest at her house last week and we wanted to treat him but that was 76 dollars for all of us darn well worth it now we had planned on doing that we absolutely don't regret the community theater we planned that ahead of time we knew there was money in the budget for that but when we got to the community theater they had these great premium popcorn bags that you could buy we bought a bag of premium pop popcorn for everybody it was 20 bucks for popped popcorn but you know what do we regret it no i don't think so because you gotta have popcorn while you're watching live theater outdoors underneath a tent in the middle of a park it just had to be done overall if you're keeping track we spent somewhere north of a hundred and sixty dollars this week on unplanned expenses do we regret any of them i think no we don't however having said that we knew that we hadn't done we hadn't used a lot of our fun money yet this year so we knew it was really flush with cash and we knew that we could sustain some damage so to speak in that area and it still wasn't going to blow out our budget but we do tell y'all all the time don't make any unplanned purchases and we wanted to prove to you that we are not perfect nearly all of these with the exception of the theater tickets which we thought through ahead of time they were all unplanned purchases but you know what we we don't do that every week so this is not something we do very often so it was certainly fun we had you got to have some fun right just a reminder for you if you'd really like your own copy of that chart i showed you that showed energy usage on appliances in the kitchen and you want to get your hands on our charts and our worksheets that we use for menu planning you can have them there's a link to that in the description of the video now if you want to know over 100 ways that we are frugal and save money every single week we did a series on it that series of videos is linked right over there you want to give it a watch next

Channel: Under the Median

Views: 161,653

Keywords: everyday millionaire, frugal, thrifty, frugal living, how do you live a frugal lifestyle, how can i live cheaper, how can i live cheap, living frugal lifestyle, frugal hacks, habits of frugal people, frugal people, habits, frugal habits, saving money, budgeting, get out of debt, money, tips for living frugally, tips for frugal living, frugal living tips and ideas, frugal household hacks, frugal habits to live by, frugal choices, frugal choices that save money, under the median

Id: hMDT4namWbw

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022