be more frugal

i’m liking the new trends in clothing i’m seeing. luckily, i save my small clothes, thinking i’ll someday lose enough weight to get back into them. but i’ve noticed this summer that girls were wearing t-shirts with really large necklines or no shoulders, so i decided cutting the necklines of my small t-shirts and what a difference! the t-shirts become longer and loose enough to feel comfortable in again.

for winter: everyone’s layering these days. so some of the small sweaters i have can be paired nicely on top of longer undershirts. helps by keeping me warmer and layering is actually really comfortable with switchable pieces.

now i don’t need to spend more money on clothes and can go through my entire closet without doing laundry for a couple weeks if i want!

The faucet on my kitchen sink was broken. It was also all nasty with hard water sediment and whatnot. I considered replacing the whole faucet rather than repairing it.
But I decided to do the repair instead and while it was taken apart, I cleaned the hell out of it and it looks nearly brand new! Steel wool = awesome.

The repair turned out to be a pain in the ass, and the actual broken part isn’t something that is fixable. I did a make-shift fix, but it won’t last forever, so I’ll have to spent the big buck eventually. For now, I got out with $11 and it looks great and isn’t gushing water everywhere!

After more than a year and a half of working on being more frugal, I can definitely say this has become part of my lifestyle. It’s helped me to do some really important things, like using the money I saved to pay off my student loans early and buy my first home. It also put me in a better mindset for my bigger goals of living simply and urban homesteading.

I just hired a professional cat sitter.

It’s more expensive per full day than taking my cat to the vet. But she charges by the visit, so I can do partial days and partial weekends. I’ll be weighing the costs for each trip I take and choosing the least expensive option. For a quick Saturday night out of town this will save me about $50. At my current rate of travel, that’s $600/year! Of course, this means I’ll not have to decline so many weekend trips, so it might cost me more…

Unfortunately, she doesn’t cross state lines, so if/when I move to Portland I need to find a new situation

Listen to Financial Peace University!

I volunteered to be the secratry for my bowling league. It’s kind of a lot of work, but I get my bowling 1/2 paid for! Woo!

I have been getting better at this. I am more hesitant to make purchases, and before I spend any money, I ask myself if I really need to spend it. Or if whatever I am spending it on could be taken care of in some less-expensive way.

I’ve been trying to be frugal by bringing my lunch to work. I’m so sick of the same 5 varieties of canned soup (I’m being a vegetarian for a while, so the canned soup selection is reduced to just a few varieties which all taste the same) and pb&j every day! There has got to be another low-effort low-cost lunch option.

I made big batches of pb&j sandwiches and cookies then froze them for grab and go lunch options on busy mornings. (There’s no excuse for eating in the cafeteria now!)

I know I missed posting a lot of these here. The rest are on my blog.

The grocery store had big signs up saying banana prices are on the rise. So the next time I passed Aldis I stopped to get 4 bunches of bananas to dehydrate. That way I’ll have cheap banana chips to munch on when fresh banana prices are high.