This months money savers included:
Free movie rental of “The Book Thief” from Red Box made a great date night at home.
My husband and I enjoyed a buy one get one free burrito from Chipotle for teacher appreciation day on a date out.
I spread compost made last year in three of my garden areas.
Dinner was served… in my husband’s classroom. I saved time and money by not going home between dismissal time and my daughter’s call time for her Orchestra concert and bringing dinner and games for everyone instead. We saved on gas $ this way, as well.
We paid off another credit card! And better yet we moved our debt free date up another month. It feels like getting the monkey off our back paying this debt off. It is unbelievable to me that we are able to pay this much money off within 19 months of finishing our Financial Peace University course while raising 5 children on a single teacher’s salary. Up until we took that class we were on an upward trajectory with debt and if we weren’t to add any more to it, it would be 20 years to a pay off date. This has been an intensely positive experience. It’s been tough and even, at times, intense but extremely positive overall.
We were able to go to the Scholastic Book Sale with a teacher’s discount and buy some books for birthdays on incredible discount staying within our budget.
I harvested cilantro from my garden already and made pasta sauce with it for dinner one night.
The whole garden is planted! There are spearmint leaves, blackberries, sweet peppers, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, cucumbers and cilantro. I am trying to utilize any space I can outdoors for a garden and sunny spots seem a little hard to come by for vegetables. As I was cleaning out the garden during the first two weeks of the month I took the opportunity to move some things around a little. I hope the mint will do better split with some in a new location. I thinned many of my perennials and replanted some to grow in new areas of the yard. I also received a spring flowering bush to plant as a gift which is very pretty.
My rain barrel provided all the water needed for gardening this month.
Peonies were cut and brought in for a table centerpiece.
I avoided turning on the air conditioning all month.
The clothesline was used for most of our laundry. This saves our family approximately $40 per month and I am outdoors keeping an eye on the kids enjoying the sunshine while hanging the laundry.
I made several dinners utilizing beans or ham bits that I had in the freezer.
Hot dogs and cream cheese were some of my bargain purchases of the month and I stocked up.
Dental floss was free with a coupon for $1 off that I used.
Finally, I made dinner baskets for three teachers as an end of school year gift. I included a nice note and a peony in each basket along with the mixes for Italian Salad dressing, Spaghetti sauce and Brownie mix. I included the cans of tomato products and the pasta needed as well as the instructions. I also made a mini loaf of white bread for each basket and included a jar of preserves. I am running low on everything at the moment so one teacher got red raspberry/lemon jam, another received caramel apple butter and the last got a jar of strawberry lemon marmalade. The reports I got from three children is that none of the teachers could believe it was all for them and I did receive a very kind thank you note from one teacher the very next day.
