6 Ways We Saved Money In September

Hey all! We’re back for another installment of “Ways we saved money last month”! The weekend kind of snuck up on me last week, and I forgot all about writing this up, but better late than never, right? 

I’ll be honest, it’s hard to feel frugal when you’ve just spent over $200 on groceries. Bleh! 

It’s a lot easier on my psyche to go shopping every week, and only buy what we need for that week, but I had an opportunity to go to a larger town, where there were better stores, so I stocked up in a really big way. 

Then again, it’ll feel pretty good not spending a dime on any groceries for the whole month of October. 🙂 

So…

Ways We Saved Money In September 

Went shopping in Waco. Gabriel had to get a part for one of his tools and it wasn’t available locally, so I jumped on the chance to do some shopping in a larger town. The Waco Aldi is the only place I’ve found where you can still get butter for under $2 a pound, and since you can freeze butter indefinitely, I went all out and bought an entire case. Yeah, that’s a LOT of butter! But just that purchase saves us about $45 over the next few months. 

Split hotel costs with friends. I went to my first ever blogging conference a few weeks ago to try my hand at networking with other bloggers (ha! I’m a terrible networker. But it was nice to see some friend there!), and learn from the experts. Even though it was just north of Dallas, it was too far to drive every morning and evening, so a few blogging acquaintances (Alyssa from Life From My laptop, and Laura from laurawilkinson.com – both very cool people!) and I went in together to split the cost of a hotel room, making it super cheap. 

Made Vitamin C Gummies for the kids. High quality chewable vitamin C tablets or dummies aren’t cheap. The more affordable you go, the more artificial coloring and/or sweetener they contain, so… I branched out an made my own! It was easy, and we were super happy with the results. Just a little juice, some vitamin C powder, and gelatin. You can find the entire recipe here and try them yourself! 

Bought Multivitamins on clearance. Nope, I’m not done talking about vitamins yet. 😉 With fall coming on, I’m trying to get the kids’ immune systems ahead of the game. We happened to stumble upon some decent quality gummy multivitamins at a local store. Score! While I’d love to be able to make these myself as well as the afore mentioned vitamin C, multivitamins are a little more complicated, so I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Made homemade hand sanitizer. My kids play in the garden and cover themselves with dirt from head to toe on a regular basis, and that doesn’t bother me, but a few days ago we Haddassah picked something up off of the floor in a public bathroom before I could stop her, and I feel 100% different about that! So rather than going out and buying harsh, chemical hand sanitizer, we were able to make our own using ingredients we already had unhand. Perfect!

Bought wheat. Yup, I said it. For the last several years, our house has been pretty strictly a gluten-free zone. But with Gabriel having additional allergies flare up, I was having to create two dishes for dinner anyway – one for us, that was gluten-free, and one for him that was gluten, dairy, egg, and many other things-free – so we decided to cautiously introduce some wheat into our cooking. We probably won’t make wheat a daily habit at home, because we don’t want to overdo it with the kids who could potentially develop allergies the way that Gabriel’s entire family has. The real benefit of using wheat is for our weekly church dinner potluck. Veggie pizzas are cheap and easy and everyone loves them! 

Your turn: What are some of the ways you’ve been saving money recently?