Saving Money by Using What You Have Already

At the beginning of the year I decided that I wouldn’t spend as much money on groceries and household items and use up what I already had in my house. With the exception of dairy products and meats. Plus over the summer I bought local produce from our farmers markets.

While I don’t consider myself an extreme couponer I am pretty good at saving money using coupons, buying what’s on sale and stocking up on those sales items. For example- I have not bought paper towels since March 2018. Granted my supply of paper towels are getting low so at some time I will have to buy more. For now I’m using what I have and will start looking for sales.

Another thing my my hubby and I have been doing is eating foods from our freezer, pantry and cabinets. This is a good thing because I had lost track of what all we had where. Having a simple inventory sheet for each area helped for quite a while and I highly recommend using one, but I admit I got lazy and quit using them. So instead of looking on the inventory sheet we had to dig through the freezer to see what was in there. Not fun! Pantry and cabinets are more organized because when something goes in there it gets put in the right area right away.

So how did I think we did at using what we had on hand- Fantastic! Not only did we save money but we used up things that were the oldest. No more finding something that expired 4 months ago. At the end of the year I ‘ll add up my receipts and compare to last year and see if I was truly successful. Even before that happens I feel that we were successful and saved our household money.

Happy Saving!