This week’s frugal results of the Dollar Diet.
This week we chugged on pretty nicely with our frugal fortnightly meal plan – although we had two takeaways, which is unusual for us on our Dollar Diet.
The first takeaway was due to our Wednesday night church home group deciding to include a meal as part of the evening’s activities. I pushed for this as 1) I think something magical happens when people share a meal together, and 2) one of our group has a long commute and often turns up without having eaten dinner – now that’s faithfulness! I figured we could make Wednesday night easier for her by providing dinner. We kicked off with Fish and Chips, but we’ll definitely have some home cooked fare in there too in the future.
The second meal was due to having a bad day, as I referenced in my previous post Parenting with Hashimoto’s. For some reason my Hashimoto’s is bad at the moment, and I’m having a LOT of bad days. I got to early afternoon and was all-in. Mr G was knackered too. Our cupboards and freezer were bare thanks to last week’s pantry audit. It was annoying, yet funny. I’m gratified to know I had done a great job at using up all our food!
Anyway, I aim to restock our freezer this week with delectable leftovers to avoid takeaway temptation.
This week’s frugal doings:
- I made vegan muffins using last week’s applesauce. Applesauce makes beautifully moist muffins. They didn’t last long! We still have lots of applesauce left which will go in more baking or as a breakfast topping.
- I hung out our washing on the line as the weather permitted.
- I baked, and baked and baked some more. Biscuits, scones, those muffins. It all makes filling lunchboxes, filling tummies, and hosting guests that much easier. And you can make much healthier alternatives to store-bought baking.
- The kids had play dates with friends at the weekend – free entertainment. The mother of my son’s friend stayed to chat and she brought brownie. She’s a keeper…
- A friend of mine came over with a DVD and wine. She’s most definitely a keeper!
- We scored a secondhand Pippins uniform for E. She adores Pippins (which is baby Girl Guides/Girl Scouts if you don’t know what it is) and asks nearly every day if it’s a Pippins day. Getting the uniform cheaply is a big help as their activity fee is high. I’ll elaborate more on why we chose Pippins as an extracurricular activity at a later date.
- I decluttered the kid’s clothes, toys and books for approximately the 1,237th time. Seriously. I seem to be constantly biffing out things the kids have outgrown or broken or had no idea they owned in the first place. Decluttering gives many people a headache, I know, but I LOVE it. I give away what I can to friends, and donate to op-shops; only relegating broken stuff or things that I wouldn’t wear or use myself to recycling. Why is it a frugal thing to do? 1) You can sell your unwanted goods for profit. 2) The less stuff you (or your kids) own, the less time and money you have to spend cleaning it, caring for it, storing it and stressing about it. Your time, energy and money are better spent elsewhere. 3) It’s freeing to get rid of things that are otherwise collecting dust, plus I love giving back to the frugal chain of charity shops, where I get most of our clothing and household goods from. My trash is someone else’s treasure. Donating your goods to charity shops helps them stay open and usually funds all manner of good works.
- Our church has a budget for children’s ministry, but I like to save them a buck or two whenever possible. On Sunday the church kids entered an art competition, and used paint, brushes and palettes I had leftover from a rock painting event I ran; and they used some high quality paper we’d had lying around for ages after it was gifted to us by a neighbour. We even used Mr G’s old t-shirts as painting aprons. $0 expenditure for the kid’s ministry this week!
God’s wonderful creation by Z, age 7
What frugal things did you get up to this week?