How to Limit Your Holiday Spending

Over the past year Eric and I have gotten pretty good at living a more frugal lifestyle. We are currently spending less than a third of our annual income and the rest goes straight in to our investment and retirement accounts. The holidays are always an expensive time for everyone but there are ways to be creative and cut back.

Now, the Christmas season is really, really important to me and I absolutely don't want to sacrifice my quality holiday experience in order to save money. I do believe however, that if you are smart and plan ahead there are ways you can cut your spending without having to loose any of the joy the season brings. In fact, realizing how much money you saved will make you enjoy it even more. Here are some tricks we use to keep costs down.

I've broken it down in to two sections, decorations and gifts. I know there are other areas to splurge on during the holidays but these are my two biggest areas of spending.

Decorations
This is a pretty easy one to save some money on. I love having the house gussied up for Christmas and feeling extra festive because of all my holiday accouterments. There are lots of ways to do this without spending much if anything.

-Use what you have.
Personally I use a ton of my leftover wedding supplies for holiday decorations. From the white Christmas lights we used for decorations to the vases that the flowers came in to the tablecloths, plates and glasses. Getting more use out of my wedding supplies makes me feel like I got more bang for my buck and lets me relive my happy wedding memories. Even if you don't have extra wedding gear laying around chances are you have some random supplies that can be repurposed for holiday decorating uses. Look around your house with a creative eye and see what you can come up with.

-Bring in some nature.
I am lucky enough to have a large yard with lots of evergreen plants that grow their naturally. Ever year I cut some things from the yard to make garlands and table arrangements. I have some lovely holly that grows in the front yard which is perfect for holiday decorating. Even if you don't have a big yard chances are you can find some pretty evergreens growing wild if you just take a stroll through your neighborhood.

-Think about getting a smaller tree.
We are doing this this year not really to save money but because it will be easier to keep Echo out of it. If you put a small tree up on a table it has the same effect as a big tree at a much lower cost (plus it's baby proof!).

-Upcycle.
My mom makes adorable Christmas ornaments out of old wool sweaters that she felts. Use last years Christmas cards to make ornaments or use This years cards to make a banner. Trader Joe's bags can be cut up to make a wreath or garland. Search Pinterest, there are tons of great ideas out there.


Gifts
-Make
I feel you have to be careful about this one. Making gifts is great and special, especially if you have people in your life that appreciate home made goodies. While it seems like making gifts is a great way to save money you really have to watch your cost of materials. Sometimes sewing a cute potholder actually costs a lot more than buying one at Target. if you are smart with your materials however and especially if you already own a lot of the basics you need to make things this can be a really wonderful way to give amazing gifts that are one of a kind. Baked goods or cutting from your Christmas cactus that you have repotted in festive containers (assuming you have a Christmas cactus that grows like crazy like I do) are good low cost options.

-Credit Card Rewards
For all my Amazon shopping this year I was able to use my rewards points from my credit card. i had been saving them up for Christmas since this Summer and was able to get about $90 worth of merchandise for free.

-Bulk Discounts
If you need to buy a lot of something be sure to ask if you can get a discount for ordering a certain amount. My mom did this when buying the beeswax candles she used as favors for my baby shower. They told her they could give her a discount if she bought a certain amount, all she had to do was ask! It may not work but you have nothing to lose by asking.

-Dollar Bins
Good for stocking stuffers and little kids. If your kid is anything like mine they usually prefer the cheap stuff to the beautiful hand made toy that I lovingly selected for them. Lots of stores such as Target and Michael's have good dollar bins.

 -Plan ahead
Start early and strategically buy things when they go on sale. Just be careful that you don't go over board. Often when I start early I just keep finding things I want to buy throughout the year and I end up with way too much stuff! You have to be disciplined if you take this approach.

Stretching Your Coffee Dollar With Iced Coffee

Is there anything more beautiful than that moment when the dream hits the coffee?

 I have a new addiction this Summer, iced coffee. I used to be opposed to cold coffee beverages but the Southern Summer heat combined with my ever growing need for caffeine has driven me to be a huge iced coffee fan. It kind started as a way to make our coffee money go a little further. You see, one of the things we don't skimp on in this house is good coffee. It has to be whole bean and it must be freshly ground before each time we brew. We have a fantastic cone filter coffee machine that I am just in love with but the problem was we would always have some left over in each pot and would end up trowing some out. I absolutely HATE wasting things, it's something that really bothers me. I could just see our good coffee money going down the drain and was killing me! I started saving our extra coffee in a stopper bottle we got at Ikea  (seriously these things are great, we use them for everything) and putting it in the fridge. Now every afternoon I can pour myself a delicious cold coffee treat. My perfect recipe is to fill the glass about two thirds with coffee, then the last third with milk, then I add just a touch of chocolate syrup and a few ice cubes, pure perfection!

I guess you would ideally have fresh coffee for you iced brew or even better do a cold brew, but for a busy (and exhausted!) mom of a 9 month old this is a great solution. It also helps me not waste coffee which makes me feel a lot more justified in buying the good stuff :-)

Eating Healthy On The Cheap Part 2

I've been thinking a lot about the way I shop and cook lately and how it has totally changed in the past few years. I used to find a recipe I wanted to make, go shopping that day and get all the ingredients for the recipe, and then come home and cook it. I would do this pretty much every day and needless to say I spent a lot more than I needed to on groceries. I still shop this way from time to time but now it's an occasional treat rather than a way of life. The biggest key to eating cheaply and healthily is to be creative. Here are a couple of tips that I find helpful for eating well and saving money.

A potato, broccoli and bacon hash that I made up on the fly for dinner last week.

1. Don't feel like you have to buy every ingredient that a recipe calls for, get creative with substitutions and think about what you can eliminate from the recipe altogether. You can really rack up a bill at the grocery store buying all the fresh spices and specialty ingredients for a specific recipe. Do you really need that fresh oregano for your dish? Can you used dried or substitute with the basil that is growing in your garden? Don't be a slave to the recipe, mix things up!

2. Cook from your pantry! This is still hard for me, I try to do regular pantry tours to remember what I have and make a point of using it. It's amazing how much food you waste if you forget about all the things you have taking up space at the back of the pantry, try to rotate things out and use them regularly.

3. Stock the pantry well, buy ahead when things are on sale. This one is a no brainer, stock up on sale items and freeze them if you have to.

4. Go meatless or cut back on meat. This will make a huge difference in your grocery budget. Do you really need meat in every meal?

5. Buy dried instead of canned. Dried beans are about the cheapest food item you can buy. Plus they are yummy and good for you! Have lots of these on hand.

5. The internet is your best friend when it comes to eating cheap and healthy. When cooking from your pantry you can easily google recipes involving whatever ingredients you have on hand. This saves you a trip to the store and cuts down on the amount of food you waste.

Making The Most Of Your Apple Peels

Part of the frugal lifestyle we are trying for envolves not wasting things and making the most of our food items. To me this is the fun part, it lets me get creative with my cooking. We were making quite a few apple crisps this Fall and found ourselves wondering what we could do with the peels.

One thing we use the apple peels for is to chop them up small, freeze them and add a few to our oatmeal for breakfast. This is great but we had too many apple peels to use in this way. This week I tried making an apple glaze with them and it turned out great! Here is the recipe I came up with for it.

Ingredients
leftover apple peels and cores
water
2 tbs brown sugar

Put peels and cores in a saucepan and cover with water. Boil for about 30 minutes and the strain out peels and cores leaving apple infused water. Boil until the mixture has reduced by half or until you get it the consistency you want.  Add brown sugar and stir to dissolve.

Finished apple glaze

This would probably be great on a dessert but we used it to cook pork chops in. Pork and apples just go together and are a natural pairing.

The above is not a great picture (especially since I forgot to take the picture until after I'd started eating it!) but it shows how we incorporated the glaze in to a meal. These are apple glazed pork chops with salt and vinegar broiled potatoes and cabbage and onion sauteed in butter. Yummy! 

Cloth Baby Wipes

And we're back to baby stuff, for now anyway ;-)

One of the things Eric and have found since we started making a concerted effort to save money is that it's nice how often being frugal overlaps with being environmentally conscious. I've already mentioned how much we love our cloth diapers and after using those we decided to try cloth wipes as well. Initially I just ordered some online to try them out. It cost about $11 for a pack of 15 flannel wipes. I liked how soft and durable they were but we go through 15 wipes in nothing flat so we definitely needed more. They are just little squares of flannel so instead of buying more I decided to make them out of scraps of flannel from (you guessed it) the remnant bin at Joanne's! For $3 I got enough to make about 20 wipes.

At first I triend just cutting the edges with pinking shears but they didn't stand up to multiple washings.

So I had to hem them

Here they are with my home made wipe solution

 They get softer with every wash and I bet they feel great on the little one's bum :-)

Now when you use cloth wipes you have to use them with a wipe solution to help get the bum area clean and not irritate the skin. My recipe for wipe solution is 2 cups water, 2 tbs baby oil and 2 tbs baby wash. I like Burts Bees brand because it smells so great but any will do. Just mix the ingredients in a spray bottle and spray some on the wipe before each use. I plan to make a bunch more of these wipes once all my Christmas projects are done :-)