Money Saving Tips Without being "Cheap"....

I have been trying to document some of the money savings tips that we do in our house. It is hard since we are just so conditioned to it, we don't really think about what we do. I'll try to list a few below:

1) Buy used cars

This one to us is pretty obvious to us right now since we are shopping for one. We have bought new cars in the past, but we will never do it again. At least not until we are too old to care about our money. We can afford to buy a new car today without debt, we choose not to. This would be counterproductive to our savings strategy. We buy used cars and then donate them when we are done with them. We have donated one to a friend in need and we will most likely soon be donating another one. We are currently searching for another used car and will be purchasing one soon.

2) Plan meals

Another way we save money is to plan meals out for a month. This allows us to shop more efficiently for food. Trust me, when we don't plan we spend! This one is a huge one. We need to be more consistent with our planning. We are still working to perfect this one and discipline ourselves to follow it. Limiting our trips to the store saves us money! Let's face it, in a large family like ours, food is a large portion of our monthly outgo.....

3) Implement a spending control plan


Way back when we went through an experiment to see how much money we were spending every month and also to see what we were spending it on. We did ours by saving receipts from everything that we purchased for the day. We threw those into a envelope and then at the end of the month we totaled them up. So much for food, so much for gas,..... so much waste! It was amazing to see what we were wasting our money on. This was a real eye opener and I highly recommend that everyone try this for one month. It only works if you are true to yourself and really follow it!


I am running out of time for this post. If anyone else has any general large family money savings tips, please post them in the comment section. I will try to post some more of these soon.

Stressed for Time???

Is there not enough time in your day? Does the day fly by and you don't seem to get anything done. You may want to check out Manager's of Their Homes. This is a nice little product that we tried and it really works well for us at certain times of the year. Some of it is more oriented toward homeschooling, which we do not do, but it still works very well with all of the kids we have running around. I realize this post is a bit off topic, but for those of you that feel you don't have the time to give to your family finances, this could be for you.

This is really just a simple color coded scheduling system. You assign each person a color code and create a master schedule for the family. We use this heavily in the summer months and occasionally during the school year. The kids like it because they can check the schedule to see what comes up next in the day. It helps to reduce arguments and fits at bed time because they know it is coming at 9:00pm. Please check it out and see what you think.

Unexpected Expenses!

We ran into some unexpected expenses this week. Luckily for us, we were prepared for it. Our no debt strategy paid off again! My truck, which I use to drive all over the place for work, had some problems this week. I came out from where I was working and found oil all over the place! I was thinking the worst! I had it towed to the dealer for the night. I would stop in and talk to the service manager in the morning when they opened.

Since many people call the dealership the "stealership", I needed to investigate my problem and arrive armed with knowledge. I jumped on my favorite websites that discussed trucks like mine and did some searching. I found out that the problem was not as bad as I had thought and I could go in and talk intelligently with the service manager. It all worked out. Although, it still cost us over $1000 after the rental car and tow, etc. Luckily, since we have no debt, we have plenty of money saved for situations like this. They don't hurt us nearly as bad as they would if we were loaded down with debt. The lack of stress associated with the situation makes it all worthwhile.


We are still looking for a car. We have also been looking for a Chevy Safari or Astro van. We need anything that will hold eight passengers....We will update when we know more...

More Grocery Money Savings...

We have run across this website that has some good ideas about saving money on food. While we do not agree with everything on the site, there are some good ideas here. Some of the recipes and stuff may not be real healthy, but some may be useful to you. There is a lot of information on this site. Feel free to check it out. Don't be scared by the name.....www.hillbillyhousewife.com