Woo hoo! My favorite time of year is here!! It’s been a HUGE struggle with frugality lately- pretty much everything went off the rails when kids started getting sick. I’ve been reflecting over the last few days and now that I know what this looks like I can try to do better in the future. The December state of the frugal union will be an interesting one that’s for sure.
On a brighter note- we’ve also decided to make December, January, and February no spend months- the only thing we’ll be spending money on are the necessities- food, shelter, and bills. No extras. This is possible because I’ve already finished my Christmas shopping and have the supplies to do my Christmas making already.
We have no major bills due over the next 3 months and with our tax return and (hopefully) a bonus from work we should be able to throw a big chunk of money toward debt. We just need to stay the course and not take on any new debt.
Anyway onto the frugal 5 that we were able to do:
- I decorated the house with Christmas decorations I already have and avoided the impulse to spend on more decorations.
- All of my shopping is DONE. I was able to purchase wisely and buy when things were at their lowest prices.
- I purchased some summer clothes for Frugal Kid #2 on super clearance and put it away for the coming summer. This is something I’m not great at doing and I always spend more than I want to on summer clothes.
- We’ve been using the wood stove almost non-stop for the last few weeks. The wood is split and ready to go, so the more we use instead of propane, the less money we spend on propane come July 1 when we pre-buy for the year.
- With everyone sick we have been making soup like it’s going out of style and the great thing about it is that it’s comforting AND super frugal. We recently tried the butternut squash soup recipe in the soup factory cookbook mentioned here and it was fantastic!- it also happened to be vegetarian and had lots of sneaky vegetables that the kids didn’t know were in there. An all around win if you ask me!
