I like having frugal weekends, days when we either don’t spend money or find ways to be frugal. Of course, the weekends can be tough. We tend to spend more not less on these days. Running more errands, we are out and about, and we have more opportunities to spend money on those not so necessary items.
So, I thought I might start a weekend report as motivation to spend less. Will you follow along and keep me in check? Here is how my household did this past weekend. It lists the good, the bad and the ugly.
We had quite a few shopping errands to run, mostly to replace things that were at the end of their useful lives.
The straps on my son’s sneakers were beyond repair. I looked into replacing them, but since the sneakers themselves were getting a little tight, we opted to replace the sneakers with new ones in the next largest size. He wore them for more than a year and we purchased them at Walmart, so I think this was still pretty frugal. We also bought him a new pair of scissors for school, because the inexpensive pair I bought on sale last month broke.
However, while we were at Walmart, we gave in to temptation and bought two DVDs at $10 total.
We also bought a package of graham crackers and some trail mix because the kids were starving and we hadn’t packed any snacks from home.
The snacks did allow us to continue or shopping without stopping for dinner right away. The kids were begging for Chinese Food, but we didn’t cave in, opting to make dinner at home.
At Lowes. we picked up a new broom for the driveway. Our old one snapped right off in the socket, so there was no way to repair it. This was a necessary purchase. We also picked up a shovel to replace a dustpan that was also broken. I can use the shovel in place of the dustpan, and yet the shovel is more versatile and can be used for other tasks.
At Target, we bought a large package of boys socks, since socks are pretty hard to get at thrift stores or garage sales. While there, I checked the food clearance shelves and found four boxes of discontinued cereal for a steal. The boxes also carried coupons for free hot wheels cars that we will redeem and save for Christmas presents.
At home, Tom repaired the plug on our vacuum cleaner, thus saving us the hundreds of dollars we could have spent buying a new machine. He used parts that he already had in his garage collection.
So how did we do?
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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